I'm not sure where to go with this in the long run. Suggestions are welcome.

Maria’s mother was the only family she’d ever met. The first question she could remember asking her was who her father was. “One of the old gods,” her mother replied. “One of the gods the people of this country worshipped before the Spanish came. The gods that demanded offerings of blood.” Maria had always assumed that she was either delusional or pulling her leg. And it might have stayed that way if it weren’t for the fact that they lived in an area where cartels were the closest thing to governing bodies. When Maria was eighteen, the two of them were at a farmers market when a shootout erupted. Maria’s survival instinct took over, and she dove for cover. When the dust settled and the gunmen were gone, she worked up the courage to peek out from her hiding place, only to see her mother lying in a pool of blood. She hurried to the older woman’s side, fighting back tears until the dam broke and she started crying. She continued for about a minute, until she felt someone tugging the front of her shirt. “Drink… it,” her mother said, weakly but firmly. “What?” “My blood. Drink it.” “Mama, I-“ that was as far as she got before her mother forced a blood-soaked hand into her mouth. She reflexively swallowed. It felt incredible. Like she’d never been completely alive until this moment. She gorged herself on her mother’s blood until the pool was gone. Her senses were sharper. She knew everything her mother knew. And was she taller, too? Carrying her mother’s body home to process what had just happened, she realized she was stronger and faster than before.

Maria buried her mother in the backyard, and spent the next several days experimenting. She didn’t sleep. It wasn’t insomnia, she just no longer felt the need. She soon learned that she could read minds now, and combining that ability with her new speed and strength she began roaming the town after dark killing criminals (especially cartel members) and drinking their blood. With each night of this she became faster and stronger, her senses improved, her mental abilities strengthened and she became taller. She was shot a few times, and barely felt it. But this was only the beginning.

One morning, three weeks after her mother’s death, Maria climbed a hill a couple miles out of town. She was naked. Having grown from her initial nondescript 5’3 to just shy of seven feet tall with defined, athletic muscles and breasts bigger than her head before finally topping out, she didn’t have any clothes that fit anymore, and even if she did she wouldn’t expect them to last long given what she was about to do. At the top of the hill was a mansion surrounded by twenty foot concrete walls topped with barbed wire, guard towers at every corner. Maria made an effortless hurdlers leap over the wall, and was hit by bullets from two snipers, one in each of the guard towers on the wall she just came over. Both bounced off her, at which point she effortlessly caught one in each hand and tossed them back at the snipers at over twice their original speed. The headless bodies of both snipers fell limp, hanging over the watchtower rails.

Maria broke down the front doors of the manor with one punch, and walked through the building in search of her target. There were plenty of heavily armed guards, but they were powerless against her. Handguns, rifles, shotguns, machine guns and even grenades and the occasional rocket launcher didn’t even scratch her skin. The guards, on the other hand, died in droves. From punches and kicks strong enough to break skulls and spines to throwing through multiple walls to just slamming into them at superhuman speed, she killed everyone in her path. Before long, she reached the cartel leader’s office. When she opened the door she was greeted by three bodyguards even taller than her, massively muscular and covered in thick, bulletproof layers of rock. Maria grabbed two of them by the arm and slammed them together hard enough to crush most of their bones. The third man lunged at her only to have a hole punched clear through his torso. Before the drug lord himself could react, Maria had crossed the room, vaulted over his desk and decapitated him with a karate chop. As she had with so many others, she drank his blood, absorbing everything he knew. Armed with that knowledge, she contacted his remaining subordinates with an ultimatum: “Your former leader is dead. I’m in charge now. For those of you willing to stay in this organization, you have two choices: Follow me or die.”