Insomniac Player

BOOM!

A column of flame erupted several streets over. Giant Two walked straight through it, grey flesh glowing red at the edges like a coal left too long in a fire.

Five fire-class players kept the pressure on. It was adapting, and adapting well.

Damien had never expected to think that sentence in his life. But it was adapting to them, specifically, their fire, their patterns, nobody else’s.

"Keep it contained!" A small guild commander’s voice cut across the noise. "Don’t try to solo it!"

Daria watched the Giant burn and not fall. "So we’re deliberately making each one a nightmare for whoever’s already stuck fighting it."

"Exactly."

"Your plans are strange, you know that."

A scream cut them off. A Grave Mantis dropped off a building straight at Damien’s head.

He ducked. Daria didn’t even turn, just tapped her staff against the ground, and a stone spike tore upward.

SHNK!

The mantis stopped a hand’s width above him, spike through its chest, legs still twitching.

"...Thanks."

She smiled, bright and unbothered, and they kept moving.

The smaller monsters had turned into their own persistent problem, most of them ringed around the Giants, harassing anyone who got close. Razorwings hounded the ranged fighters. Ravagers punched holes through defensive lines. Mantises scaled the towers to go after snipers and mages perched up top.

The players had adjusted, though. Lower-levels took the smaller threats. High-levels held the Giants. Support classes bounced between whoever needed them. For a few minutes, it actually looked like the line was holding.

Then Giant Three fell.

BOOOOOOM!

It crashed through an intersection, and cheers rolled out across the block. He turned toward the noise. The ice team had earned it, one leg frozen solid, an arm gone entirely, half its chest caved in around a spear of ice thicker than a telephone pole.

A woman in pale-blue armor stood at the center of it, frost clinging to her hair, breathing hard, smiling anyway.

Level 72, flashed briefly above her head.

She raised a hand. "FINISH IT!"

A dozen ice-users answered at once, spears raining down.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The Giant vanished under a pile of frozen debris.

➤[Hollow Giant eliminated.]

The whole northern front went up in noise.

"YES!"

"ONE DOWN!"

"ELEVEN LEFT!"

"We can actually do this!"

Daria was smiling too. Damien wasn’t. He stared at the corpse, something not sitting right in his chest.

➤[Hollow Giants Remaining: 11/12]

One dead, eleven left. Exactly the math it should be. So why did his gut refuse to relax.

He looked around, and the other Giants had already stopped. All of them, at once. Giant One quit mid-swing against Noah. Giant Two walked out of its own flames and just stood there. Giant Four’s arm dropped, unfinished.

Across Tycho, eleven blank faces turned in perfect unison, not toward him this time, toward the corpse instead.

Daria caught it too. "...Why’d they stop?"

Salma’s voice cut into the channel. "Sleepless."

"I see it."

The corpse twitched. Players nearby stumbled back on reflex.

"What the hell?"

"It’s dead!"

The body started collapsing in on itself, shrinking as glowing particles bled out from under the skin, blue-white light rising off it in a slow column, thousands of points, then millions, gathering above the wreckage into something almost beautiful.

For half a second nothing happened.

Then the cloud split eleven ways.

WHOOSH!

Each thread shot off across the city, straight into a different Giant.

➤[Collective Evolution Activated.]

➤[11 Hollow Giants have inherited a fragment of their fallen kin’s adaptation.]

His face went blank. "...We’re phucked."

The battlefield erupted at once. Frost spread across Giant One’s already-hardened skin. Pale crystalline patches bloomed across Giant Two’s burning body. Giant Four’s electrical field started mixing with freezing mist, all eleven of them picking up a slice of Giant Three’s resistance in the same instant.

Daria stared. "They shared it between them."

"Everyone stop attacking!!!" Too late already. Panic had beaten the order out.

"What happened?!"

"They got strongerrrr!"

"Attack!"

"NO!"

Noah’s voice tore across the emergency channel, loud enough to shake through everyone’s system window at once.

"NOBODY KILLS ANOTHER ONE!"

The order repeated itself automatically across every interface.

➤[EMERGENCY COMMAND]

➤[DO NOT ELIMINATE ANY ADDITIONAL HOLLOW GIANTS.]

The ice team’s leader stared at it. "...What?" Then, louder. "There are eleven of these things wrecking the city! Why wouldn’t we kill them?!"

Damien jumped off the overturned bus and ran for the command group, mask riding up crooked from the fall, his hand shoving it back down without thinking. "Because whichever one dies next teaches the other ten what it learned."

If they kept killing them off one at a time, the last Giant standing could end up resistant to nearly everything they had. And every death made the rest stronger in the meantime.

Noah arrived a moment later, breathing rough, one arm slicked in blood. "Then how do we kill them?"

Nobody had an answer ready. Eleven Giants, and they couldn’t pick them off individually anymore, but they couldn’t leave all eleven alive either. He looked out at the field. Giant Two was already back on its feet, ripping an abandoned truck off the ground and hurling it at a cluster of players. Daria’s staff came up, wind catching the vehicle mid-flight and slamming it into an empty building instead.

CRASH!

"We need them dead at the same time," Salma said. Flat. Certain.

He looked at her and understood immediately, there wasn’t another option on the table.

Noah frowned. "How close does ’same time’ need to be?"

"As close as we can manage. Seconds, if we can get it. Less would be better."

Daria looked out at the skyline. "That’s eleven Level Sixty monsters. You want us timing every single death down to the second."

"Pretty much."

"It won’t be easy." She rubbed her forehead. "I hate your plans."

"Same."

Noah touched his wounded arm, thinking it over. "Then we don’t kill them. Not yet."

A few nearby players stared at him like he’d lost it. Someone actually laughed.

"Excuse me?" He pointed toward the Giants. "We cripple them instead."

That killed the laughing fast. Damien got it immediately.

"Legs. Joints. Take their mobility first."

Noah nodded. "Can’t run if they can’t stand."

"Cut them off from the evacuation routes," Salma added.

"Trap what we can," Daria said. "Earth cages, barriers, anything that pins them in place."

Damien looked out at the remaining Giants. The whole objective had flipped on its head. Beat eleven things nearly to death and stop right there. No finishing blow. Hold every single one on the edge, and drop them all together when the moment came.

He opened the emergency channel. "New strategy incoming."

Replies came fast.

"Who is this?"

"That’s Sleepless."

"The Level Fifteen?"

"Why’s he still talking?"

He ignored all of it. "Don’t hit the core. Don’t touch the head. Go for legs, knees, tendons. Cripple, don’t kill."

A pause, then a skeptical voice. "You want us to keep them alive?"

The nearest Giant answered for him, chest splitting wide open.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!

He winced through it. "...Unfortunately."

Noah picked it up from there. "You heard him. Get them critical. Then hold."

The battlefield reorganized itself around an order that sounded genuinely insane on its face, hundreds of players who’d spent years learning exactly how to end a monster’s life, now being told to stop right before the finish.

Giant Four charged. A lightning-class player raised his spear and put the strike into a knee instead of the chest.

CRACK!

It buckled.

"GOOD!" Damien shouted. "Again!"

Another bolt, and the leg gave out completely. Earth mages caved a street in under Giant Six. Physical fighters shattered Giant One’s ankle. Fire users burned straight through Giant Two’s tendons. A wind team cut Giant Eight’s legs out from under it without touching the torso at all.

One by one, they started going down.

➤[00:07:43]

Seven minutes. He swallowed. Players bleeding everywhere, mana reserves scraping bottom, whole blocks simply gone from the map. Eleven Giants still standing, however crippled, and his own quest still sitting unfinished.

➤[Personal Hollow Giant Eliminations: 0/1]

He stared at it. "...Right." He’d almost forgotten in all of it. Everyone else needed these things kept alive a little longer. He was the one exception in the whole plan, the one person on this battlefield who still had to personally end one, or lose a piece of himself that would never come back.