Chapter 60 — The Giant II
That is the part I did not expect and the part that made it work. It bent its knees and put its whole upper body down and sideways, until the good shoulder was barely above the height of a man.
Because all five of us were on the floor, and a thing eight metres tall cannot hit the floor with a stick held at chest height. It has to come down to where we are.
"DOWN—"
It swept the trunk flat and low, and the far end went through the leaf litter rather than over it, ploughing a furrow two metres wide and throwing mud and dead wood ahead of itself in a wave.
Gideon went under. Declan burst sideways out of the arc. Erik got behind a trunk thick enough to matter and put his back into it.
I could not see Clara.
Then I could, and she was still coming out of an attack on the calf with about a third of a second and no distance at all, and she was going to be somewhere in the middle third of that sweep.
> **[Mana: 214/220 → 208/220.]**
I burned through my heel and hit her.
There was no time to be careful about it.
I took her across the shoulder and the ribs with my forearm and drove both of us sideways into the churned mud, and the trunk came through the space where she had been standing and the bark went across my back.
I felt it take pieces out of the plating and out of the padding underneath, and then wood and dirt and torn root came down on top of both of us in a wave and I got a mouthful of soil.
Behind us it went through three smaller trunks.
They did not break so much as burst, and the noise arrived as one thing rather than three, and dirt was still coming down through the branches four or five seconds later.
Clara was up before I was.
She did not say a word to me.
She spat, took her second blade back out of the ground where it had gone, and went straight back in on the leg, and I lay there for one more second with my face in the mud before I followed her.
We were hurting it. That is what I thought.
The calf had four separate cuts across it. Erik had put two axes into the torso and a third into the shoulder. Gideon had opened the knee.
And my burn had gone through the hide entirely, and I could see the mess of it every time the leg came forward.
Then I looked at the burn again and the back of my neck went cold.
The edges were closing.
Erik saw it at the same moment. I know that because his arm stopped halfway through a throw and hung there for half a beat before he finished the motion, and Erik Lind has not hesitated once tonight.
Clara had been circling for another gap and she stopped circling.
Gideon’s face did not do anything at all.
His eyes went straight down to the knee.
It was not instant, which is the only reason any of us were still alive.
The cuts on the calf were tightening at the edges rather than vanishing, and the axe in the ribs was being pushed slowly back out of the wound as the tissue closed behind it.
The black ring around my burn had shrunk by about a fifth in the time it took me to notice it was shrinking.
Slow.
Faster than five people can open new holes in eight metres of muscle.
We could stand here all night putting cuts on it and it would simply take them.
I looked at the knee, because the knee was the one place not closing properly, and the knee was the one place that had been hit four times by four different things inside ninety seconds.
"THE LEFT KNEE."
I did not build up to it. There was no time and it would have been insulting.
"Nothing else. Everything into the left knee. It cannot fix what we keep breaking."
Gideon moved before I finished the sentence.
He did not question it and he did not look at me. He simply went to the front left, where he could take whatever came down and keep its weight sitting on that leg, and he started making it stand there.
Erik and Clara took about two seconds longer. They watched Gideon commit, and then they went.
Declan came in on the outside without a word, because the tactic that kills the Giant is also the tactic that keeps Declan O’Rourke breathing for another ten minutes, and whatever else he is, he is not stupid.
The hand came down at me first.
I saw the shoulder drop and I got two strides out of the way and it did not matter.
The hand landed where I had been standing, and the shockwave took my back foot out from under me, and I went down on a hip in the mud.
Then Gideon was standing over me with his forearm up.
The wrist came down onto it and he went to one knee with my shoulder against his shin, and something in his arm made a noise I have not stopped hearing since.
"Up," he said.
I got up.
Back behind the leg. Same crease, same forty centimetres of burned meat, because there is no point starting anywhere new on hide like that.
I put my fist in it and held the fire on.
That is the part nobody tells you about Aten. Holding it on is not like throwing it.
My forearms started shaking inside the gauntlets before three seconds were up and the muscle in both hands went from tired to cramping, and I had to consciously keep the fist closed because it wanted to open.
And the smell came up off the wound in a column.
Cooked hide and cooked fat, straight into my open mouth because my nose had stopped working an hour ago, and my stomach turned over hard enough that I had to swallow twice and keep burning.
> **[Mana: 208/220 → 148/220.]**
The leg came back and I got out of the way of it and my boot went into the churned ground past the ankle and I had to physically drag it out.
Above me it kept trying to look down.
Every time the head started to come toward the three of us at the leg, something arrived in its face. Erik put an axe into the cheekbone from eleven metres and the head came back up.
Then Clara went up the outside of the forearm, put a blade through the soft skin inside the elbow, and dropped off before the other hand got there.
The head came back up again.
I did not have time to look at either of them properly. What I had was the leg in front of me, and the fact that every four or five seconds it stayed still slightly longer than it should have.
That was them. That was what that cost them.
Declan came past me twice inside thirty seconds, arriving on the outside of the knee and hitting it and being gone before the hand finished coming down, and each time he went the wind of it moved the leaves around my boots.
He did not look at me once.
Then it started making a different sound.
Lower and longer than the one it had opened with, and I felt that one in my sternum from six metres away rather than hearing it.
Its lips had come back off teeth the size of my hand.
And it started hitting its own leg.
Open hand, downward, again and again, trying to crush whatever was gathered around that knee, and twice it hit hard enough to hurt itself and did it again immediately.
I got clear of the third one by about a metre.
Then it stopped reaching for us altogether and put both hands into the ground.
*BOOM.*
The clearing went up. Soil and leaf litter and half of what was left of the fire, and a shock that came through the soles of my boots and simply removed my footing.
Erik went onto one knee. Clara caught herself on a trunk and stayed there. Gideon stayed up and had to widen his stance to do it.
Declan was thrown sideways off a burst he had already committed to.
And I was inside its reach with both hands in the mud.
> **[Ability Activated: Androphagos.]**
>
> **[Duration: 60 seconds.]**
The field went out and the Giant filled all of it.
That Ability does not make me faster and it does not make me stronger and it has never once saved my life on its own. What it gave me was the weight shift.
I felt all of that mass go over onto the right leg before the left foot had finished leaving the ground.
"IT IS STAMPING. MOVE. *MOVE.*"