At a mere one hundred and fifty feet tall, this strange object was far from the tallest structure in Manhattan, but its geometric uniqueness against the otherwise repetitive silver skyline of high-rises like shaved grass blades drew Lilly toward it. A single step brought the giantess above what she now realized had to be Madison Square Garden, and in observing its glimmering circumference, plus the blue-shining lasers sparking from its ramparts too, she inspired herself with a fun idea.
Peeling her right foot off its current resting place in the wreckage, causing half-crushed buildings and cars like cupcake sprinkles to rain from her sole wrinkles as it arched, Lilly hoisted her ped in midair, letting it hover in just the right place so its thick oblong shadow darkened the stadium more effectively than any raincloud could. Then, pointedly flexing her big toe down as far as it could reach while still flaring her remaining megaton piggies, the girl let her foot descend toe-first toward Madison Square Garden: as yet unbroken by the city’s current havoc, and also coincidentally stuffed to the gills with thousands of hysterical survivors rushing inside before the falling cars and buckling buildings could smash them.
Many of these terrified onlookers now camped inside were witness to the giantess’s elegant yet frightfully bulky big toe leading the steady charge back to terra firma, like seeing an oncoming meteor in slow motion. By the time Lilly prepared to press a nine-hundred-foot-wide peachy digit pad into the hapless streets, the majority of her “audience” inside the arena assumed the Garden itself was her target, but this wasn’t the case. Impressively meticulous, the girl instead planted her largest digit into the ground with a seismic thud, albeit as gentle a touchdown as she could manage, just close enough to the stadium that all anyone could see out the windows was the mirror-shine plate of her toenail and the surrounding pedicured texture of her skin.
Then Lilly began to remodel, specifically altering the ground itself like art class clay by twisting and grinding her toe. Backed by the strength of a forty-billion-ton giant woman, that monstrous digit split the concrete easily as the surface of water, creating just deep enough of a crater for the girl to gain some purchase on the earth, and drag the blunted curvature of her shapely toe in a ring around Madison Square Garden. Steadily her soft flesh carved through dense rock like a hot knife through butter, rolling no faster than a car could’ve driven down the street, which took some incredible control on Lilly’s part, but she was patient and intent on accomplishing this very particular ritual, if only to prove to herself she could.
As she drew a circle around the stadium, cautious not to let any harm befall the structure itself just yet, naturally every other location surrounding the Garden was made collateral for the giantess’s unstoppable toe. Buildings came down by the dozen, especially when she dipped her second digit just enough to aid in grazing over a wider surface area in the quarter-mile surrounding the city landmark. Soon nothing was left standing anywhere close to the arena, setting it distinctly apart. Squished cars, tanks, street lights, and crumbled asphalt collected like dust against the bulwark of brawny toe flesh, swept in a broad loop around the site that concluded at last when Lilly’s toe finished its 360-degree roundtrip and completed cutting the deadly moat.
And just like that, the famed stadium became like a little castle perched alone on a raised platform of crooked street, set apart from the foot-crunched wasteland, while a rounded toepad-shaped canyon and veil of rising smoke enclosed the structure, quarantining it and the thousands of souls inside from the mania around it. At least for now. Some inside the building, ready to leap at any chance for foolish hope, had begun to convince themselves that, for whatever reason, the demolition-loving leviathan who’d come to annihilate New York in a single morning had chosen to cordon off the Garden, and planned to leave them as survivors. Thus many began pre-emptively celebrating their choice to flee into the sanctuary of the stadium, though those pressed to the windows and doors, too suspicious to be happy yet, were proven to be correct in their paranoia when Lilly’s foot arose back into the sky by a mile, before leaping far ahead for a five-digit landing on the plush ball-tips of her toes in an entire different district of the city. The landing was so distant that the stadium refugees had no reason to fear the wrath of those wriggly extremities except for the citywide tremors their impacts caused. Still, there was a much realer new threat to discover, one which made the survivors’ cheering gradually go quiet, returning to grave silence, when at last everyone inside Madison Square Garden realized that Lilly’s bare heel was now poised directly above the stadium.
The giantess had her foot arched up by half a mile, giving the helpless denizens of the arena plenty of airspace between the wafer-thick open-air rooftop shielding them and that gargantuan peach-white ever-so-gently-callused heel belonging to this goddess of destruction. That distance was of little comfort, however, when the panicked crowds were granted such an unusual vantage to the underbelly of Lilly’s naked foot, leading from her wideset heel threateningly hovering way overhead, all along the fleshy isle of her smooth crease-laden sole to her toes, the tips of which were just barely concealed behind trembling office buildings a mile and a half ahead. The svelte, monstrous shape of her foot’s underside, teeming with life and musculature, specially lotioned by sparkling debris from every skyscraper or human she’d squashed into jelly today, represented power that could only be understood in macabre terms, such as now, when thousands of people who thought themselves briefly secure were marooned atop a pillar of wobbling stone, with no feasible escape over the moat even if they poured en masse from the stadium and ran as fast and far as they could. What amounted to a circular glass bead was their only protection below a girl of such unthinkable magnitude and self-centered whims.
Lilly, though unsure exactly what the people inside Madison Square Garden must’ve been thinking, at least wished to give them sufficient time to consider their lowly positions and admire her handiwork, or rather toework, from up close. She was satisfied with her careful craftsmanship, having kept the stadium intact throughout such a delicate process, the equivalent of ripping up bedrock without upsetting an ant, and now it was time to enjoy the fruits of her labor. Releasing a sigh in tandem with her glacier-speed gas-pedal motion, Lilly let her heel drop. The giantess knew she had to move slowly, as the integrity of the ground surrounding the stadium, owing to the playful circle she’d drawn around it, would be so brittle now that a casual brush with her pinky toe would probably cause the whole artificial tower of earth to collapse in on itself.
Keeping this in mind, she let her heel descend painfully slowly, until with great concentration, she felt the rounded roof of the stadium pressing against her skin, as one might notice a pebble in one’s shoe. She held this position for as long as she could, since her foot was already quivering slightly from the awkwardness of such a prolonged arch, and sure enough, one good twitch was all it took to feel the stadium falling away beneath her. The foundations had buckled. Lilly was quick to follow, of course, slamming her heel into the newly formed canyon and turning the proud arena, plus all its inhabitants, into unrecognizable splinters buried flat amongst the rest of the flame-blackened refuse under the weighty anchor of the astronomic giantess’s foot.