Zane looked up through his windshield at the enormous phoenix fucking the stadium several blocks away and shook his head. “That’s so clichéd.”
Should he have been scared and driving away for his life? Probably. But mostly, the hawk just felt annoyed. So much wasted potential! Zane had a strong affinity for giants, and if he had that sort of size, he knew exactly how he’d make the most of it.
A loud moan and deep rumble under his feet signaled the phoenix had climaxed. The panicked Torontonians streaming through the streets only served to make Zane more annoyed. Great, now I’m going to be late, he thought. His appointment was still a bit deeper downtown, but traffic had become impassable.
Fortunately, Zane had one thing that most of the other honking, impatient drivers didn’t: wings. There’s typically a lot less traffic in the sky. So, Zane pulled into a nearby parking garage and left his car there. It was a beautiful day to stretch his wings, anyway. Zane leapt off the top of the garage and with just a few swift wingbeats was soaring over downtown Toronto.
The exercise was invigorating. Not only did it feel good to work his wing muscles, but he also got to escape the utter stupidity and carnage below — people getting in each others’ way as they all tried to escape some overgrown avian who wasn’t even paying attention to them. I’d give them something to try to escape from, he thought, beginning to daydream about all the cruel things he’d do to the crowds underneath him.
It was precisely such daydreaming that kept the hawk from realizing that such fantasies would imminently become reality, as with each pump of his wings, he grew a bit larger. But Zane didn’t notice; at least, not at first. His avian instincts subconsciously altered the height at which he was flying to maintain the same altitude, despite his doubling, then tripling, then quadrupling in size.
It wasn’t until Zane had reached more than ten times his original size that he noticed something was different — that the streets below looked truly tiny, and that his wingbeats were beginning to inflict gale-force winds on the buildings underneath him. A smirk curled across his beak as he began to grasp what was going on, and he suddenly surged upwards, flapping his wings furiously until he was above what few clouds were in the sky.
He hovered there for a few minutes, continuing to grow with every beat of his wings. Zane took it all in, the incredible feeling of growth and the sheer scale of his resized body, now hundreds of feet tall, compared to everything else. A jet flew by, looking more like a toy plane. Zane had half a mind to swat it out of the sky, but it veered away and he didn’t feel like giving chase.
No, the real fun was underneath him. He looked back down toward Toronto. At this height, the CN Tower likely outsized him, but there were few, if any, other buildings that could claim the same. Zane folded his wings against his back and turned his hovering into a dive.
A few residents likely would’ve seen the growing bird before he soared above the clouds, but most were still preoccupied with fleeing the other macro that had appeared earlier. Certainly, nobody was expecting another bird, as big as a skyscraper, to come streaking down out of the sky. And by the time they saw him, it was already too late.
Zane slammed into downtown Toronto, feet-first, with incredible force and velocity. The sound of the impact alone was deafening. Entire city blocks rocked up and down as powerful seismic waves rolled through the city center, caused by nothing but the hawk’s thick paws. Residents were thrown to the ground as the skyscrapers around them began to crumble from nought but the simple act of a landing bird.
Zane chuckled. This felt good, very good, as if it was what he was meant to do. He raised a powerful golden paw high over the intersection where he’d landed, casting a massive shadow over the twisted metal of disfigured vehicles and the writhing waves of panicked crowds. He wiggled his talons lazily, letting the sunlight glint off the shiny claws at the tip of each toe.
Then, gently, he placed it back down again, savoring the sensation of crumpling metal beneath his foot as he turned the intersection into a colossal, debris-filled avian pawprint. He rubbed his heavy soles into the pavement and let out a low, satisfied moan.
“Run, little bugs,” he snickered, surveying the carnage surrounding him. “The rest of my steps aren’t going to be that gentle.”
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