I couldn’t help recalling my battles against them at lower levels in Skyrim.
Annoying bastards.
Even wearing the heaviest armor, they’d kill you in just a couple of blows.
Which was exactly why I’d been sent to deal with them.
Without armor but with Auri-El’s blessing, I was supposed to be too fast for their attacks.
In theory, anyway.
Hopefully, the giants’ lair would be spacious enough for me to maneuver properly.
Otherwise…
fireball to the mug, then haul ass in the opposite direction.
I had no intention of risking my own hide any more than necessary.
I wasn’t some heroic idiot.
“Vaysi, how many giants did our scouts say were in this cave?” I asked, looking over the bones scattered throughout the passage.
Some of them were unmistakably elven.
Or human.
Though the latter seemed unlikely—this was the western side of the Throat of the World, and humans hadn’t settled here yet.
“Four.
Why?” Vaysi glanced at me, apparently not paying attention to the finer details.
It was one of her quirks, and it inevitably led to her adorably getting mad at herself afterward.
“They flat-out lied.” I wanted to use a stronger word but held myself back.
“Judging by the number of bones…
and by when they were first spotted here…
I’m afraid there are at least twice that many…”
***
Mo-o-otherfu-u-ucker…
The Snow Elf scouts were lousy.
I swear.
How the hell could they have screwed up this badly?
Seven giants—and two of their smaller offspring!
The giants, who looked remarkably human—or elven—had gathered around an enormous campfire that was no longer burning.
The charred tree trunks, however, stacked into something resembling a giant Czech hedgehog, made it abundantly clear that a fire had once burned there.
“So what’s the plan?” Vaysi asked in the quietest whisper, drawing her rapier from its scabbard.
It was obvious she wasn’t thrilled about facing so many giants, but her duty as a knight-paladin outweighed her fear.
“Considering there’s only one way out, and our enemies don’t know the first thing about magic?” I chuckled, already falling back on a tactic I’d tested more than once for dealing with enemies in narrow tunnels.
“Fire runes by the exit.
Then we’ll meet them while they’re trying to put themselves out.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
“Interesting saying…
Is that from the southerners?” she asked, giving me a curious glance.
“There was a story in one of the books available to the First Sword about one of their human slaves who said that after defeating some minotaur.
Our southern kin were so impressed that his name was preserved in history.” I quickly improvised an explanation for how I knew that, despite not having prepared one beforehand.
Knowing how to convincingly justify my oddities was absolutely essential in a different society, so it was something I’d learned from an early age.
Without wasting any more time, we first laid down ice runes to slow the charging giants, positioning them so they’d stumble straight into the fire runes placed behind them and set themselves ablaze.
The sudden change in temperature wouldn’t destroy their legs or inflict any truly serious injuries, but reality had one thing the game never did.
Pain.
Oh, our enemies were about to experience plenty of it.
And really, what could be easier than killing a man-eating giant screaming in agony?
Or, in our case, an elf-eating one.
Putting on the most infuriatingly smug expression I could manage and clearing my throat a few times to prepare the most mocking voice possible, I stepped into the giants’ line of sight.
“Now, what should I call you to do you justice?
You’re clearly Giants of Thought, so I ought to come up with something worthy of your truly towering intellect…
Oh…
And why are you getting so angry?”
There was no way they’d understood what I’d said.
They weren’t smart enough to know the Snow Elf language, and nobody had ever bothered to learn theirs… But apparently, my tone alone—combined with the sight of me—was enough to enrage them, and several of the giants began lumbering to their feet.
Nope, not enough.
I hurled a few harmless but thoroughly irritating firebolts into the faces of the ones that were still sitting, got exactly the reaction I wanted…
…and promptly turned tail and sprinted back the way I’d come.
“I’d want to kill you for that too,” Vaysi commented as I ran out of the cave and ducked around the corner of its entrance.
“That’s how I get by.” I gave her a two-finger salute, fully aware of how it looked from the outside.
Plenty of people in my previous life had wanted to punch me in the face for exactly that.
The results of our little trap didn’t take long to appear.
First came the biting cold after the cave’s warmth, then a series of fiery explosions struck the giants full force.
I was clever and agile enough to slip past the magical runes hugging the cave wall.
The giants, on the other hand, never even thought of it.
We let the first two pairs of roaring, pain-wracked enemies charge out of the cave.
Then, in perfect unison, we slashed through the nearest leg of the next pair.
Not clean off, but deeply enough that they crashed to the ground, while the giants behind them barreled straight into them, creating a glorious pileup.
“I’ll distract them!” I called to Vaysi as I dashed toward the four giants who had emerged first.
“Understood,” the elven girl replied in a serious tone, and at last I invoked Auri-El’s blessing.
Or, for simplicity’s sake, the River of Time.
The world slowed.
I accelerated.
The familiar sensation settled over me as time itself flowed differently for my body.
The flames clinging to the giants’ legs and clothing writhed in slow motion, while the man-eaters themselves seemed to be moving through thick, viscous sludge.
Under normal circumstances, they could still react to me, but blinded by pain?
No.
Right now, the difference between us was like that between a man and a fly.
I was practically untouchable to them, and the feeling was intoxicating.
Especially considering I’d come without armor.
May Auri-El watch over your path, and may your support keep this tale alive.