Chapter 62 — The Giant IV
He was not taking a chance because Gideon was down. Gideon *being* down was the chance.
Kill the anchor, and the Giant does the rest of it inside two minutes. Erik goes under a hand. Clara goes under a foot. I go wherever I go.
Then one man walks out of a forest and tells a captain that a monster killed five people, and there is nobody left alive anywhere in this dungeon to say otherwise.
That was the play. It was clean and it was quiet and it cost him nothing.
He simply did not get it.
And now he could not have it, and I watched him work that out at the same time I did.
Because the obvious thing, the thing my stomach expected, was for him to turn around and take the two witnesses out of the world.
He cannot.
The second he goes at Erik Lind he is one man alone in a clearing against two armed Players, a Red Gate veteran who is now watching him, and a Level Thirty-Seven monster that regenerates and does not care whose side anybody is on.
He cannot run either. Not through that. It knocked him twenty metres once already without trying.
The Giant is the only reason he is still breathing, and it is also the only reason his story is dead.
He got to the end of that in about four seconds, and I watched his shoulders change when he did.
He stopped trying to look innocent.
> **[Lycaon — SS activated.]**
It went faster this time, or it seemed to, because I already knew every stage of it.
The spine. The shoulders. The bones moving under the skin of the back. The arms lengthening and the hands going wrong and the jaw pushing out of the face, and dark fur coming up through the forearms and spreading across everything.
His boots split apart and came off in pieces.
Then the breathing dropped into that register no human chest produces, and he straightened up a head and a half taller than he had been.
Erik went back two metres and brought his axe across his body.
Clara moved sideways and put a trunk between herself and him without ever fully turning her back on the Giant.
Neither of them said anything.
He went at the leg.
Whatever else that man is, he did not spend one second of Lycaon on us, because the Giant was still standing and Declan O’Rourke can count.
And Lycaon on that knee was a different problem entirely. He did not need a burst to arrive and he did not need one to leave.
He simply lived in there, tearing at the joint with both hands, coming off it and going back inside the same second, and the wounds he opened were the width of my forearm.
So I got back behind the leg.
My hands had stopped closing properly by then. I had to look at them to make a fist, and the fire came up slower than it had an hour ago, and my whole right forearm was one continuous cramp from the elbow down.
I put it in the crease anyway.
The joint was open.
Not a wound. A gap.
I could see where the structures inside it were supposed to meet and where they had stopped meeting, and every time it put weight through that leg the whole thing moved about four centimetres in a direction legs do not move.
It was still trying to close. I could see the edges reaching.
It could not do it fast enough any more, because there were three of us in there and none of us had come off that forty centimetres of meat in six minutes.
Above me Erik shouted something I did not catch and threw.
The head went up and stayed up.
That was the window and all three of us took it in the same second without anybody saying a word, because by then none of us needed to.
Gideon came in from the front and put everything he had into the outside of the joint.
Declan tore across the front of it from the other side with both hands.
And I had my fist buried in the back of the crease with the last of what my arms were willing to give it.
Something inside the leg let go.
I felt it through my own forearm before I heard it, a long structural crack and then a wet tearing underneath the crack, and then the entire limb folded inward at the knee.
Eight metres of weight came down.
I got about a metre and a half before it landed.
The clearing jumped.
It took my feet out from under me for the third time that night. Erik went down. Clara stayed up by holding a tree with one arm.
A wave of wet soil came out from the impact and went over all of us at about knee height and half filled my collar.
Even winning nearly put us on our backs.
Its head came down into reach and nobody had to be told and nobody waited for me to say anything, and I want that on the record, because there is a version of this where I decide the boss is mine.
It was not mine. It was never going to be mine.
Clara went up the fallen arm and put a blade into the left eye.
Erik hit the throat from eleven metres, twice, and the second one went in and stayed.
Declan got onto the side of the ribcage and started tearing at the neck with both hands.
I went to the burn I had already made and drove Aten into it rather than trying to start anywhere new, because starting anywhere new on that hide is a way of wasting Mana I did not have.
> **[Mana: 108/220 → 73/220.]**
And Gideon went for the head.
It fought. It got a hand on Declan and threw him twenty metres into the undergrowth, and he came back out of it.
It nearly closed the other hand on Erik and would have, except that Clara opened the second eye and its face went the wrong way.
Then it reached for Gideon and I felt the arm start through the last seconds of the field.
"LEFT. LOW."
> **[Androphagos expired.]**
He was already gone from where the hand went, and the hand was in the mud, and his path to the head was open.
He took it.
He got up onto the shoulder and reinforced everything he had and started hitting the temple, and there was nothing clever in any of it.
Five, six, seven, the same place, and by the fourth one there was no shape left in that part of the skull.
The Giant put a hand up to cover its own head, like a person.
We did not let it.
Erik put an axe into the wrist. Clara went up the arm and worked the inside of the elbow. Declan tore into the forearm from the other side.
I burned the shoulder joint until the arm stopped coming up properly and my hands were shaking so badly I had to brace one wrist against the other.
Whatever it was doing to close its own wounds could not keep pace with five people all working the same forty centimetres of skull.
Gideon landed the last one.
The head went down into the mud and stayed there.
Its fingers went through the soil once, slowly, curling, and dragged four furrows about a metre long.
Then nothing.
---
Nobody moved.
That is the part I remember most clearly. Five people standing in a wrecked clearing in the dark with a mountain of dead animal in front of them, and not one of us went anywhere near it for about eight seconds.
Because it had been closing its own wounds four minutes ago.
I watched the chest.
Nothing rose.
I watched the ruined knee, where the joint was open and the tissue was hanging, and none of it moved and none of it tightened.
> **[Giant defeated.]**
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> **[Contribution recorded.]**
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> **[Experience acquired: 310.]**
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> **[EXP: 460/800 → 770/800.]**