Insomniac Player

Damien bent forward, hands on his knees. "Hah..." One breath, then another, trying to make his heartbeat catch up with everything that had just happened.

He looked toward the central battlefield. Noah was already moving. Salma followed a step behind him.

Daria stepped up beside him. "Coming?"

He looked at the twelve Giants scattered across the skyline, his quest window still hanging at the edge of his vision.

➤[Hollow Giants Remaining: 12/12]

"Sigh... don’t have much of a choice, do I?"

The party moved.

◇◇◇

The Giants stood scattered, but not far, their size alone gave them away from blocks out. The deeper they pushed into Tycho, the worse it looked.

The city was burning. Half-collapsed buildings leaned into each other like they were holding each other up. Players everywhere, some fighting, some hauling the wounded, and some just lying still under sheets that nobody had gotten to yet.

He didn’t let his eyes linger on those. Couldn’t afford to.

A Razorwing dropped toward a knot of medics. Daria’s staff came up, a blade of wind opening its throat mid-fall, its body crashing through a storefront window.

"Move!" she shouted, and the medics scattered.

He followed her through the intersection. Ahead, one of the Giants had reached a wide avenue, and a damaged evacuation vehicle sat dead in its path.

Movement inside caught his eye. "People in there. Thirty, maybe more."

The vehicle had wedged itself against a slab of broken road, front wheels trapped, engine grinding uselessly as the driver tried to reverse. Nothing.

The Giant noticed. Its chest split open.

A child screamed from inside the bus.

"MOVE!"

A player shot forward, someone he didn’t recognize, silver armor, a red guild crest, fast enough to blur mid-air. Mana gathered thick around her fist. "GET AWAY FROM THEM!"

BOOOOOOM!

Her strike caught the Giant’s shoulder dead center, and the whole avenue shook with it. Half the shoulder simply ceased to exist, grey flesh and bone and muscle scattered across the street in one motion. The arm dropped. Players froze for a beat, then broke into cheers.

"She got it!"

"Keep going!"

"It’s almost dead!"

The woman landed, smiling.

He didn’t. Something sat wrong in his chest. It wasn’t falling. Its chest-mouth stayed open, and the system wasn’t flagging a kill anywhere.

Black threads crawled into the wound, thin as veins at first, twisting, knitting, pulling the torn flesh back together. Bone first, then muscle, then skin, the whole shoulder rebuilding itself in front of everyone.

The woman stared. "...What?"

The Giant shifted its stance, foot sliding back, torso twisting into a shape that looked painfully familiar.

His eyes widened. The same stance she’d just used.

"No...."

Its fist pulled back, then launched, a crude copy, same twist, same explosive release.

BOOOOOOM!

She barely got both arms up before it landed. Her body punched through two buildings and slammed into the wall of a third.

The quest hint surfaced in his mind, clean and cold. Predatory Adaptation. Every Hollow Giant develops a different ability depending on the first player who seriously injures it.

Another player raised a spear, lightning gathering along the blade. "I’ll finish it!"

He caught the man’s wrist before it could move. "Don’t."

"The hell are you doing?"

"Don’t attack."

"What?"

"It learned from her."

"We know," the man said, flat, already trying to shrug him off.

"No." He tightened his grip. "You don’t."

The man yanked his arm free hard enough to swing Damien half off his feet. "Let go."

He didn’t. "If you hit it with lightning and it learns that too, then what?"

That landed. The man’s jaw shifted. Daria’s expression changed beside them.

"Every time we show these things something new," Damien said, watching the shoulder finish knitting itself whole, "they’re learning it."

The spear lowered slowly. Nearby players had already caught the exchange.

One woman laughed, nervous. "That’s ridiculous."

"It isn’t." Noah’s voice, arriving behind her. He looked toward the first Giant, the one he’d hit himself, already reshaped into something built to answer raw strength. "They change based on what actually hurts them."

That killed the conversation entirely.

He scanned the district. Twelve Giants. Hundreds of players. Wind, fire, lightning, ice, sword, blunt force, poison, dozens of ways to hurt something, and if everyone attacked freely, they’d hand every single Giant resistance to all of it inside the hour. Worse than doing nothing.

His mind kept turning it over. One resistance, manageable. Two, still manageable.

He turned to Salma. "Tell everyone."

"Tell them what."

"One damage type per Giant. That’s the rule."

She stared at him a beat.

He pointed. "That one’s already adapted to blunt force." Pointed at another. "If fire hits that one first, only fire users touch it after that. Nobody switches."

Daria frowned. "That sounds backwards."

"It is." He nodded. "But fire hitting a fire-adapted Giant teaches it nothing new. We’re not trying to kill them yet. Just hold them down until the real reinforcements land."

Salma’s eyes narrowed, then cleared. She understood before he finished. "Twelve monsters with one resistance each," he said, "beats twelve monsters resistant to everything."

Noah looked at him properly for the first time since Ironfall. "That’s actually smart." Whatever measured distance he’d been keeping shrank a notch. Around them, the name had already started moving through the crowd, quiet, half-whispered, Sleepless, and the mask kept every one of those faces from ever matching it to anything else.

"Thanks," Damien said.

"Don’t get used to it." Noah clapped his shoulder once, hard, and moved off.

Salma was already firing off messages, orders threading through the system network, guild leaders receiving instructions in real time, voices breaking across the battlefield.

"NO RANDOM ATTACKS!"

"ASSIGN TARGETS!"

"PHYSICAL TEAM, NORTH GIANT!"

"FIRE USERS, EASTERN AVENUE!"

"ICE USERS, MOVE SOUTH!"

The chaos began to bend into something with an actual shape, slow, awkward, ugly, but real. Twelve Giants. Twelve separate fights. One weakness, one adaptation each. A battlefield finding order in the middle of a full collapse.

Daria fell in beside him. "So? Which one’s ours?"

He looked out at the twelve towering shapes. His quest window sat unmoved.

➤[Hollow Giants Remaining: 12/12]

He let out a breath. "Let’s make sure nobody accidentally makes them immortal first."

BOOM!

One Giant crashed into a building somewhere off to the left, and a cluster of players cheered. He turned toward the sound on instinct, and something cold slid down the back of his neck for no reason he could name yet. Not relief. Not quite dread either. Just the sense that whatever they thought they’d figured out, they hadn’t actually found the bottom of it.

The plan spread across Tycho in under three minutes. Clean on paper. Considerably uglier in practice, in a burning city, with a language barrier between half the guilds and no shared chain of command.

"PHYSICAL TEAM, KEEP YOUR MAGES BACK!"

"Lightning group, Fifth Avenue, now!"

"Stop attacking Giant Seven!"

"Who fired that?!"

"NOT ME!"

"THEN FIND OUT WHO DID!"

He stood on the roof of an overturned bus, watching the battlefield slowly reorganize itself beneath him, his system map cluttered with crude markers he’d dropped in on the fly.

Giant One, physical. Noah’s monster, already reshaped into something built like a wall of muscle.

Giant Two, fire, its pale skin gone the color of burnt stone.

Giant Three, ice, half its body crusted in frost that no longer seemed to be slowing it down at all.

Giant Four, lightning, thin currents crawling visibly across its skin.

The rest were splitting off into wind, piercing, blunt, earth, water, cutting, poison, ranged, one by one falling into their assigned lanes.

Not perfect. But holding.

"Why am I taking orders from a Level Fifteen?" a guild player muttered nearby, loud enough to be heard on purpose.

Damien glanced at him. "You’re welcome to let them adapt to everything instead."

The man walked off without another word.

Daria laughed. "You’re really winning people over out here."

"I’ve always had a way with strangers."