Chapter 123 Giant fight

All of us sprinted through the trees toward the giant we saw. I wasn’t sure we were even going to fight it yet, but it stood out incredibly to me. First, giants weren’t monsters. He shouldn’t exist in this dungeon unless he was an invader or the boss, as bosses could break the rules of what could spawn in dungeons. He didn’t look or act like a boss, so most likely an invader.

The second thing, the giants were extinct, at least they were supposed to be. They were exclusive to the southern continent, and the southern continent was now overrun with undead… Which made the third thing more obvious. The giant was undead. As I watched from just behind a tree, I couldn’t believe a race as powerful as them was wiped out, but that is exactly what happened.

It looked like a man fighting bugs and insects. Every time he slammed down with his club, all I could think was how much overkill it was. He’d be better off stomping them to death with his feet, as the wind-up for the club was tremendous; all the nearby monsters lurched up into the air from the sheer force, before a wave of wind pushed them away.

All I could see, though, was how ineffective a creature as large as him was at fighting smaller creatures. Stomping might be more effective, but the most effective thing I could see him do to wipe out most of the creatures would be to lie down and roll, turning himself into a crushing machine for anything in the direction he rolled in.

Sure, it would be a little embarrassing, but it would be hundreds of times more effective and would make far less noise, plus he wouldn’t be spotted miles away as we did. I heard Sarah ask in a whisper. “So, what do we do?” Leaf responded. “That creature is not natural here. We’re going to have to kill it.” Sophia also responded. “But it's another fucking giant. If it’s as tough as the last one we fought, it’s going to be a really difficult fight.”

Olivia and Delilah both spoke at the same time. “We’re stronger than we were.” “We have to fight it to protect the city.” I cut them off by agreeing. “They’re both right; we at least need to try. If it’s too strong, Silk will call for a retreat; we’ll stagger running away from slowest to fastest to make it easier. Cherry, wait to fire any magic until we know we’re going to stick around and fight.”

Tems must have grown tired of talking; she was always an action-first kind of person, ever since the first time we fought the goblins. Olivia was right; we weren’t the same people we were ten years ago, and that showed in how explosive our movements were when we finally did take action. Even I could take down Marcus now, and I wasn’t in a combat class; that’s how much stronger we all were.

The giant was bulky and slow, and was also facing away from us. It meant that he wasn’t even aware we were approaching until Tems was stabbing her daggers into his body to make handholds to climb up even faster. Only once he felt pain did he begin to turn. If the behemoth was forty to fifty feet tall, the giant was seventy to eighty feet tall.

Climbing him would be similar to scaling a small cliff, and Tems had already passed his knee before he realized what was happening. Silk jumped up to fifteen or so feet, just as he was preparing to attack, and slammed her sword right into his kneecap. Now, the sheer size of his body meant that the sword could only go in about the depth of a nail on a normal person, but a nail going in at the wrong place would still hurt a person tremendously. Her sword pierced all the way through his bone. That wasn’t all; she grunted and wrenched it upwards as we all watched in shock as his leg buckled.

The behemoth was not only big, but it had far more defenses than this undead giant, which made perfect sense. Its body was already naturally decaying; its grey skin sagged, and while it couldn’t feel pain, it probably registered the blow as it lost control of its leg when it was preparing another full-body swing at our group.

Tems was halfway up the giant when it started to tumble, and instead of climbing off, she just moved to the side that wouldn’t be crushed. Pulling her daggers out by the chains they were attached to, the arsenal she carried was plenty of specialty gear like that now. She and Silk took adventuring the most seriously, and it showed in how powerful they were.

The giant was still falling when an empowered arrow struck it in its face, and the blow was so strong that it caused an explosion, ripping its jaw completely off its head. The blow might have been fatal if she’d struck higher up near the eyes, but it was clear this wasn’t going to be a difficult fight after that. Leaf depowered her next strike as she thought about what this meant. Was there another undead giant around? Possibly an entire group? If it were this easy, there had to be more, right?

The giant finally tried to moan out something, but with its jaw gone, none of us could understand what it was saying. I knew one thing for sure now that we were deeper into this dungeon. The dungeon itself was under attack, not only physically through people, but the land itself was changing from the sheer miasma of death that invaded it.

Dungeons were designed to counter imposing forces like this, but the dungeon was already on the verge of corrupting and going berserk; all the dungeons I hadn’t corrected were. So the dungeon was already on its last legs, and very well could have become an undead dungeon if we hadn’t intervened, or been destroyed by the undead to make way for their army pushing through.

That was a far more likely outcome; even if the dungeon began producing undead, it didn’t mean it wouldn’t actively fight against the undead invaders; it just meant the monsters it spawned would be far more dangerous and harder to deal with, far more likely to push in and corrupt other dungeons after it fought off the invading forces.

The dungeon knew we were helping it, though, and it appeared to be a much closer fight than I originally thought as the boss monster of the dungeon began wreaking havoc on the undead now that it didn’t have to be worried about the giant. The boss was another giant creature, a treant in the shape of a giant hippo, was doing work, biting undead in half before spitting them out, while the treant minion monsters were now pushing back hard against the undead.

His body landed just as Tems made it to his neck. Still recovering from being tripped, he was far too slow to stop her as she finally began her assault, drilling into him so fast she practically buried herself in his neck before the giant knew something was wrong. The fight took less than thirty seconds, and most of that time, Tems spent climbing up the giant while he was falling. All of us stared in slack-jawed amazement as she climbed out of his neck, absolutely drenched in black, gory blood as she started to wretch from the smell. “Oh gods, it got in my mouth!”

We all smiled as we watched the fight shift into the dungeon's favor. I would need to make a safe zone nearby to see if the undead were going to push in deeper and to see if Tems got sick from accidentally getting undead sludge in her mouth. We were going to have to do something about this; otherwise, the dungeons, already on the edge of corruption, were going to go berserk.