Chapter 61 — The Giant III (Bonus)
Declan went first, because Declan is always first. Erik went backward off his knee. Clara cleared the circle with about a boot’s length in hand.
The foot came down and split the earth where she had been standing, and the impact went up through my forearms where they were still braced in the mud.
After that I stopped being a fighter for about half a minute and became a mouth.
Gideon had gone in under the ribs and the far arm started coming round behind him, on the side his own shoulder was blocking, and I felt the mass go before the elbow moved.
"ROOK. RIGHT. BEHIND."
He dropped without turning round to check.
The forearm went over the top of him and took a branch off a tree eleven metres away, and he came back up out of it and hit the knee again.
Then the fingers started to close in Erik’s direction. Not the arm, the fingers, and that is all Androphagos gave me, a shift in something living six metres out.
I put the whole of my chest into it.
"ERIK. *MOVE.*"
He went, and the hand shut on the space he had been standing in, and I watched it drag through the leaf litter and come up with nothing in it but soil.
Two people still standing who would not have been.
I had about eight seconds of feeling good about that.
Then it stopped mattering, because there is a limit to what knowing something is worth.
A forearm came across the clearing and I knew it was coming and I knew exactly where it was going, and there was still no version of my legs that got me out of an arc that wide in the time available.
It clipped me.
I went into a tree, shoulder first and then the whole length of my spine, and the bark took the skin off the back of my neck, and everything in my chest went out at once for the second time that night.
> **[Health: 295/330 → 215/330.]**
I came down on my hands and knees in the leaves and coughed.
That is all I could do for about four seconds. Cough, with nothing coming in behind it, while my ribs refused to open and my arms shook underneath me and the ringing came back in my left ear.
I got one leg up. Then the other. Then I was standing, badly, with a hand flat on the trunk.
Nothing about that was fast and nothing about it looked good.
Somewhere in those four seconds Declan changed.
> **[Hati — S activated.]**
I looked up and his pupils had gone to vertical slots and the nails on his hands had thickened, and the muscle across his shoulders and thighs had come up until the straps on his gear were taut.
I did not stand there and look at it.
I have already stopped in a clearing to stare at that man’s Abilities like a boy at a shop window and I have already paid for it, and once was enough.
What mattered was what it bought him, which was the ability to stay in close.
He stopped needing one burst per attack and started living inside the reach of that leg, hitting the knee four and five times in the space where he used to hit it once.
And his eyes and ears were doing something that let him come off the joint half a second before the hand arrived.
And the knee started losing.
Every time it came forward now it came forward wrong, and the tissue was trying to close over a crease that three people kept reopening, and the closing had slowed and slowed until it had nearly stopped.
> **[Mana: 148/220 → 108/220.]**
The Giant felt it before any of us did.
Its next step nearly folded and it caught itself on a hand, and after that it stopped being careful.
It tore another trunk out of the ground and swung it with no interest at all in where the rest of it went. It took out two other trees doing that.
It drove the swing into the earth and left a trench and then dragged the trunk sideways through the remains of our fire and sent the coals up in an orange spray that went out over all of us.
The clearing stopped being a clearing.
Broken branches everywhere, torn roots standing up out of the churned mud, smoke from the wrecked fire lying flat across the middle of everything at about waist height, and leaves coming down constantly out of the shredded canopy.
My boots were sinking to the ankle and every step out cost something.
And in the middle of that, Gideon took a knee.
He had turned another downward blow into the soil and it had cost him more than the last one, and he went down onto one knee with a hand flat on the ground for about a second and a half.
Declan came off the leg.
I saw it and my whole body understood before my head did, because his line was wrong. The knee was on his left. He had gone right.
"ROOK. BEHIND YOU."
Declan committed anyway.
He had already started, and stopping would have looked exactly as bad as continuing, so he went through with it and drove a clawed hand at the side of Gideon Rook’s neck while the man was down on one knee looking at a monster.
Gideon turned and caught it on his forearm.
Then the Giant’s arm came through both of them and threw them apart, and there was no more of it, because there was no time for there to be more of it.
Erik saw it.
I know he saw it because his axe came round about fifteen degrees toward Declan and stayed there for half a second before he made himself put it back on the Giant.
Clara did not move her weapons at all.
She just looked at Declan O’Rourke, once, across ten metres of churned mud, and there was nothing left in her face that was uncertain about anything.
Two hours of arguing did not do that.
Four seconds of him did.
And I finally understood what he had actually been trying to do.