The Giant's Desert
The Giant's Desert
Slipping out of Kardi proved simple.
Just as when they'd entered, the sentry Jina knew the routes so well that slipping past her was all it took.
Getting past her might have been tricky, but they had the last descendant of an ancient god with them.
A last descendant who'd put 7 into Strength.
Tossing a couple of people onto her shoulders and running was trivial for Angie.
Loading on extra baggage and packs didn't slow her down either, so the party cleared Kardi without incident.
They vaulted the wall while the sentry Jina was elsewhere, landed, and kept walking straight into the desert.
Several times they nearly crossed paths with patrolling house soldiers, but the soldiers were in too much of a hurry to spot them.
The rumors held true: they were pulling back fast, and the patrols were spread thin with wide gaps.
The walk to the desert was uneventful.
Aslan figured nothing would go wrong. Everything pointed that way.
If wraiths appeared, he could handle them. If monsters came, there wasn't anything they couldn't hunt down.
A bit of monster hunting would actually be good for Ereta's physical adjustment.
Food was plentiful, water abundant, camping gear and supplies more than sufficient. No cause for complaint or concern.
The worst-case scenario he'd considered was something other than wraiths showing up.
As it turned out, the trouble came from an entirely unexpected direction.
Under the hammering sun, desiccated trees cast claw-like shadows across the sand, their outlines wavering in the dry heat.
Aslan stood with both hands half-raised, his expression sour.
The universal posture of surrender. He wasn't the only one holding it.
Ereta had her hands up too, narrowed eyes betraying a faint, smoldering displeasure, while Angie wore her annoyance openly, her raised hands resting on top of her head.
They were surrounded by giants.
The giants had a distinctive look. Neither quite human nor fully monstrous — something uncanny in between.
Mouths, eyes, the general shape of the face echoed humanity, but their heads were too large, their legs short relative to their bodies, their arms disproportionately long.
Those arms should have dragged on the ground, but they kept them clear by carrying their weapons slung over their shoulders or gripping them in their fists.
The weapons were mostly crude stone implements that had never evolved beyond basic forms.
Axes chipped from rock made up the majority; a few carried pick-like weapons or spears.
Their clothing was just as primitive as their armaments suggested.
Hides ripped from massive beasts draped their bodies in a vaguely Grecian style.
Scales and fur pelts wrapped them, and they ground their protruding teeth audibly, breath hissing.
One giant let out a guttural growl. Spittle flew from its mouth; Aslan sidestepped to avoid the droplets.
"Human! Speak truth!"
"Yes, speak truth! Where from?"
"As I said, from Kardi..."
"No lies! Speak truth!"
A stone axe slammed into the ground with a boom. The sheer volume of sand it kicked up made the giant's strength unmistakable.
A pity the intelligence didn't come close to matching all that muscle. Aslan suppressed a sigh and glanced aside.
Unlike Aslan, who looked merely put-upon, Angie radiated open irritation. Where Aslan was weighing options, Angie looked ready to start swinging right now.
Ereta was calmer and more guarded, but the corners of her narrowed eyes carried a faint murderous edge.
If she'd still been a high priestess, she would have attacked already.
'I'd be the same.'
Baking under the desert sun while being subjected to pointless interrogation, Aslan felt a prickle of genuine irritation himself.
He could have accepted it if the questioning held any logic.
"You, human! Surely friend of wraith-calling wizard!"
"Right! Human bad! We ask help, you not come!"
"...Did I not tell you earlier that I am the help? That I came from Kardi to aid you..."
"That is lie! We ask lord for help! You not lord! You weak! Surely bad wizard's friend!"
The interrogation was stuck at the level of a child's reasoning — worse than a child's, really — and it grated on him.
Listening to the circular accusations, Aslan exhaled.
"There's no law that says I must be the wizard's friend. If the lord had sent me, that might be different."
"Hmm, no! We are giants!"
"I can see that."
"Giants are valuable! Precious and excellent! So lord comes personally!"
At a loss for words, Aslan's face twisted openly. Fortunately, the giants either didn't care about human expressions or couldn't read them.
"So you, wizard's friend! Tell where wizard's house is!"
BOOM.
The stone axe came down again. Closer this time, the spray of sand sharper. The axes were creeping steadily nearer. The logic might be infantile gibberish, but the strength behind it was real.
Even Angie as she was now couldn't match this kind of brute force.
The threat these creatures posed was lethal.
"...Hoo."
Aslan let out a long breath, emptying his lungs of the stale, rank air — the heated stink rolling off the giants' bodies.
The atmosphere was heating up. Frustrated at getting no useful information, the giants were growing angrier.
Emboldened by their irritation, they shifted their grips, readying their weapons to swing at any moment.
"You not speak, you die, human!"
Aslan blinked slowly. When his eyes opened again, they were hooded, half-lidded.
He had held back so far because they hadn't genuinely tried to kill him.
Now a giant was openly threatening his life.
If they attacked, Aslan would follow his iron rule.
Anything that comes at him dies.
"I wanted to settle this cleanly."
"What?! Human, speak big! Your voice small!"
Aslan lowered his surrendered hands and, with a look of deep displeasure, reached for the axe strapped to his back.
"I mean that if you try to kill me, I have no choice but to kill you."
He gripped the haft below the axe-head, pulled it free, and let it settle into his hand. The weapon was in his grip now, and he muttered the words with a flat, cold look.
The thick killing intent laced through his voice rippled outward, and the giants' survival instincts prickled in warning.
Dull wits are often enough to override instinct, though. The giant who had frozen for a heartbeat was already opening its mouth to roar again.
"Human, if you not speak...!"
"KYAAAH!"
A scream drowned out the shout.
Aslan hadn't done anything that would cause a scream. The giant who'd been harassing him froze in confusion. Both of them turned toward the sound.
In that direction, one of the giants had dropped its stone axe and was fleeing, shrieking.
Every panicked stride shook the desert floor and flung up sand. The other giants turned, baffled.
"Wra-Wraith! Wraith has come!"
"Run!"
The cause stood beyond them.
A translucent body, white with pale blue shimmers mixed through it.
That much was standard for a wraith. What was strange was the size.
The wraith matched the giants in both stature and shape. The giant wraith clutched what looked like a stone axe of its own, screaming a silent howl.
"Do not run, cowards! Fight!"
The giant who'd been threatening Aslan shouted after its fleeing kin, but they paid no attention and kept running. Dust clouds bloomed and receded into the distance. With an angry snarl, the giant charged the wraith.
WHOOOOM!
It brought the double-handed stone axe down in a massive overhead blow. The sand erupted in a pillar of dust.
A strike no human could have withstood. Even a priest without exceptional strength would have struggled to take it. The erupting dust carried immense physical force.
There was just one problem.
"Urk!"
Physical force meant little to a wraith.
Through the dust, the wraith reached out and seized the giant by the throat. If the wraith had been human-sized like most, that couldn't have happened — but this wraith and this giant were the same size.
The giant thrashed, kicking its legs forward and back. Its body lifted slightly off the ground, and its face began to turn a sickly blue as its airway closed.
Aslan watched the scene, still puzzled.
Not because the wraith was impervious to physical force, nor because it had appeared out of nowhere.
Something more fundamentally wrong.
'A giant wraith... that shouldn't exist.'
The monster in front of him shouldn't have been possible.
Wraiths were a phenomenon limited to human races blessed by the ancient gods — they didn't manifest among the demi-human peoples called giants.
Yet here one was, as real as the sand, trying to kill a giant. The strangeness of it, the inexplicable impossibility, brought Aslan to a momentary halt. Then he recognized an opportunity.
A chance to provide undeniable proof.
He thought of a technique he hadn't used since gaining the new ability, and drew the single-edged blade from his waist.
The method of activation was the same as any other skill. Merely repeating the name in his mind sufficed.
'Purity.'
White light washed over the blade. Even under the descending sun, the blaze of white radiance held unmistakable presence.
Aslan gripped the sword in both hands and planted his feet wide, one forward, one back.
He needed only three steps.
One step.
Mana flooded his legs, tightening sinew and bone, bracing him.
Two steps.
He raised the sword burning with pure fighting spirit and sighted the wraith.
Three steps.
He called down the sky-wandering thunder and let it coil through his legs. The name rose in his mind at last.
'Thunder Call.'
CRACK-BOOM!
Aslan's body launched forward, blasting the sand aside in a violent wake. His form blurred through the churning dust.
SHHHHING!
The blurred silhouette sliced clean through the wraith's neck. The wraith's head sailed through the air, tumbling end over end.
A wraith's neck — a thing not made of material substance — severed like human flesh and rolled across the ground. It made no sound as it went.
Headless, the wraith collapsed and dissolved as though it had been a living creature, its body sinking into the sand and fading. The giant whose throat had been caught tumbled free, coughing and hacking.
KEEEEEEEE!
The wraith's shriek faded with its body. Aslan landed and turned toward the sound.
"Uh, uuaah?"
His eyes met those of the giant who'd been threatening him. The giant was frozen, utterly failing to process what it had seen. But one of the fleeing giants had looked back.
The shrieking, vanishing wraith. The human with a sword. Its kin now released and coughing on the ground.
The scene was unmistakable.
The conclusion was not.
"The lord! The lord killed the wraith!"
The giant bellowed this bizarre conclusion, and the others who had fled turned with sounds of confusion. They saw the vanished wraith and exchanged glances.
"...What?"
Aslan was still processing the absurdity when the giants came charging back, shouting.
"The lord came to save us!"
"Lord...?"
Even the giant who'd been threatening him was touching its own throat with dawning, misplaced understanding. Aslan pieced it together.
Giant leadership went to the strongest. Always the strongest. That strongest giant then received the title of 'chief' from Baron Werbid.
To a race where raw power equaled authority, dull intellects had simply assumed humans worked the same way — the highest-ranked must be the mightiest.
They had witnessed Aslan's martial prowess and concluded he was the lord.
Aslan understood, and as the giants crowded around him, bellowing with joy, he thought:
Impersonating nobility was, by most legal codes, a serious crime.
One that had never made sense to him, admittedly, but in most nations it carried heavy penalties.
Aslan was no lord. Not even a noble. He could not simply say yes, I am your lord, when the giants were celebrating as though he were.
Someday the newly appointed Baron Werbid would come to address the giant problem, and there was no guarantee a giant wouldn't blurt something out.
Getting arrested for impersonating nobility was not in Aslan's plans.
"Wait. I am not your lord."
He raised a palm to halt them. Confusion bloomed on their faces.
"I am Aslan, the Master of Combat. Have you not heard of me?"
They almost certainly hadn't, but the title was real. No impersonation. Better to be called Master.
The giants proved predictably blank — they scratched their heads, rubbed their chins, scratched their bellies, and traded puzzled looks.
Through the long pause, the giant who had threatened Aslan and tried to fight the wraith shouted out:
"Master! The Master has come to help us!"
"Master! The Master! He saves us!"
"The Master came to kill wraiths!"
They clearly had no idea what a Master was, but Aslan decided it was good enough and let out a breath.
Ereta and Angie, who had been hanging back with baffled expressions, finally approached. The giants looked at them and announced:
"Master, we guide you to chief! You hear chief's story and help us!"
Warm now, suddenly companionable, the giants beamed.
Aslan regarded the creatures — unchanging whether in the game or reality, consistently simple — and allowed himself a dry sense of relief.
At least they wouldn't stab him in the back.
He answered with a wry smile.
"Fine. Take me to your chief."
Without hesitation, the giants hoisted the party onto their shoulders and heads, and ran into the desert.