Chapter 59 — The Giant I
**POV: Jace**
---
There was a ringing in my left ear and mud in my mouth and I could not make my chest open.
I had landed on my back and my shoulders and everything in me had gone out at once, and for three or four seconds the only thing in the world was the fact that air would not come in.
Something enormous exhaled about nine metres away and the gust of it went over my face.
Wet hide. Old blood, the kind that has been sitting on something for weeks.
Rotting vegetation underneath both of those, warm and thick, and it got into my open mouth and coated the back of my tongue and made me gag on the breath I was still trying to take.
I got one elbow underneath me.
Then the ground hit my palm.
That is how I felt its foot come down, through the wet soil into the flat of my hand and up my arm and into my back teeth, and I heard the impact about half a second after I had already felt it.
Somewhere off to my right Declan swore.
> **[Sköll — A activated.]**
He came out from under it, and the foot landed where he had been, and the earth opened under the heel in a line two metres long.
Wet leaves went out in a flat ring and about a kilo of them came down on my chest.
I rolled onto a hip, got a boot planted, and stood.
And then I made the mistake of looking up.
Its legs first, because they were what was in front of me and each one was thicker than the trunks it had walked through to get here. Then a waist that was above the height of a man.
Then a chest, and shoulders sitting up level with the lower branches, and I had my head all the way back by then and had still not found the top of it.
Eight metres. Something like eight metres.
Grey-brown skin stretched tight over muscle that showed every shape underneath. Old scars laid across the torso, some of them thirty centimetres long.
Coarse dark hair at the collarbones and down the outsides of the arms, and arms that hung past the middle of its thighs.
And a face, which is the part nobody warns you about.
A human face made wrong by being that size, with the nose pushed flat and the jaw grown out past what the rest of it could carry, and eyes set so deep under the brow that all I could see in them was our campfire.
Its head was in the branches. They were moving around it.
> **[Giant — Level 37.]**
Twenty-nine levels above me, and my hands had started shaking, and I could not tell whether that was the impact or not.
"NOLAN, ON YOUR FEET."
I was on my feet. Gideon was thirty metres away and had come out of the undergrowth with leaf litter all down one side of him and could not see that from where he was standing.
Erik had gone right, out past the edge of the fire ring, and had put his back to a trunk with eleven metres of open ground in front of him and an axe already in his hand.
Clara had gone the other way and lower, through the flattened ferns, and she was not watching its hands at all.
She was watching its feet.
Whatever I think about the rest of this night, Meridian did not put those two on that roster as a favour.
"ROOK." Declan, from thirty metres, pitching his voice to carry over the noise the thing was making. "We are going to die separately in about four minutes."
"I know what we are going to do." Gideon did not look at him and did not raise his voice, and somehow it arrived anyway. "You are going to fight that. I am going to fight that."
"Then—"
"And when it stops moving, you and I finish the conversation. Nothing about this is forgiven. It is postponed."
Declan did not get to answer, because the Giant had turned.
It came down at Gideon with the right arm, and not as a swipe. The whole limb, elbow leading, driven downward, and it moved at a speed that had nothing to do with its size and my stomach went over sideways watching it.
Gideon went underneath.
> **[Adamant — S activated.]**
He did not try to take the hand flat. He got the forearm and the point of his shoulder up under the wrist at an angle, the way you take a falling beam if you are stupid enough to take a falling beam at all.
It drove him back anyway.
His boots opened two trenches through the wet earth, a metre and a half of them, with mud coming up around his ankles in dark fans.
At the end of it he turned his shoulder and put the whole arm into the ground beside him rather than into himself.
The hand hit and the noise arrived in my chest before it reached my ears.
Dead branches and leaves came down out of the canopy across half the clearing and kept coming for three or four seconds.
I have watched Declan O’Rourke hit that man with everything he has. He put him back four metres once, in Lycaon, and I remember standing there thinking it was the most force I had ever seen applied to a human being.
This did it one-armed, downward, with its feet planted, as an opening.
Something cold went out through my ribs and sat there, and I was still standing exactly where I had stood up, doing nothing at all about any of it.
It did not reset. That is what nearly killed him.
It tore the arm out of the soil and swept it flat at Gideon before he had his weight properly back underneath him, and there cannot have been half a second between the two.
He dropped under the forearm and the hand went past him and into a tree.
The trunk did not bend or lean.
It came apart, one long wet splitting crack that went through the whole clearing, and the top four metres of it went over into two other trees and hung there at an angle, shedding splinters and leaf and bark onto everybody underneath.
A piece of it went past my head close enough that I felt the air move.
"MOVE, NOLAN. STOP LOOKING AT IT."
Right.
I did not run at it, because there is a way of dealing with something that size and it is not the way an eighteen-year-old wants to deal with it.
My father spent six years putting that into me. You do not go inside the reach of a limb you cannot survive, and you go around, and you watch the feet.
So I ran wide.
Outside the arc of the arms, in a circle, with my boots going into churned mud and coming out heavy, and I made myself watch the way its weight moved rather than the way its hands moved.
Which leg it loaded before it turned. How long the hips took to follow the shoulders. Where it had to plant before it could reach.
Somewhere in that circle my breathing stopped being something I was doing and became something happening to me.
Behind me, steel went past.
Erik had more than one axe.
The first went by its shoulder and took a piece out of a tree behind it, and the second hit under the ribs and went in about eight centimetres and stayed there, and the enormous head came round toward him.
Which was the entire point.
Clara went in underneath it while it was turning, low and fast along the outside of the left leg, and both her blades opened the back of the calf, and she was out again before the hand arrived.
> **[Sköll — A activated.]**
Declan hit the right knee.
Everything about that strike was correct. Full acceleration, whole body committed, straight into the joint.
The leg moved about three centimetres.
Against a person that punch removes the person. Against this it was a man hitting a bridge support, and the hand came down for him and he was gone before it landed.
But the hand coming down was the whole thing, because the hand coming down meant the shoulder had dropped and the hips had turned and every kilo of it was now sitting on the left leg.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 220/220 → 214/220.]**
I put a short burn through my heel and went behind it.
Not at the leg.
Behind it, into the metre of ground it could not reach without turning its entire body, and the smell in there was appalling, close-up hide and old blood.
I got both boots planted in the mud and put my fist into the crease at the back of the knee with the fire already full on my knuckles.
*FWOOM.*
The hide went black in a patch the size of a dinner plate and I heard the skin split under the heat before I saw it.
Something hot came out of the wound onto my forearm and I did not look at what it was.
The leg buckled.
Ten degrees, maybe. It caught itself.
But it buckled, and I got about a quarter of a second to be pleased about that.
Then it turned faster than anything eight metres tall has any business turning, and the backhand was already most of the way to me.
I went backward and understood inside a fifth of a second that backward was not going to be enough, because the hand was two metres across and there was no edge of it to get outside of on foot.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
I got out of the line.
I did not get out of what came behind the line.
The air moving in front of that hand hit me like a door and I went over sideways and rolled four times through wet leaf and came up hard against a root with my shoulder.
> **[Health: 330/330 → 295/330.]**
My ankle told me about it immediately.
Same ankle. Same joint. Fine for eleven hours and now hot from the joint all the way up, and I had used the Ability exactly once.
I got a hand into the mulch and pushed up and my palm went straight through the leaves into cold mud underneath and I ended up on all fours instead.
Second attempt worked.
Twelve metres away Gideon had gone into the burned knee from the front while the thing was still turned toward me, and the difference between his strike and mine is not something I had to think about.
Mine burned it.
His moved it.
Something inside the joint made a noise like a wet rope going, and the Giant took a step it had not planned to take, and its hand went down to the soil for balance.
Nobody said anything.
Declan simply changed where he was hitting, and the next burst put him on the outside of that same knee.
Erik went the other way and started working the head, and Clara went up with him, and it happened inside about four seconds without one word passing between any of us.
That was what five people who all know what they were doing look like when they arrived at the same answer at the same time.
My lungs had gone raw by then.
I did not know when that started.
Somewhere between the burn and the backhand my breathing had turned into something I could hear over the top of the fight, dragging in and out through an open mouth.
There was sweat coming down out of my hairline into the cut on the back of my neck, and it stung.
I wiped my face with the inside of my wrist and put mud across it instead.
Then the Giant stopped reaching for people.
It turned away from all five of us at once, which nothing in any Gate has ever done in front of me, and closed a hand around a young tree at the edge of the clearing, and pulled.
The roots came out of the wet soil with a tearing that I felt through the ground, and half a tonne of earth came up hanging off the bottom of it.
It took the trunk in both hands near the root ball and turned.
Then it dropped.