97. The Giant Who Withstood a Ten-Kiloton Nuclear Blast

The Giant Who Withstood a Ten-Kiloton Nuclear Blast

Far out at sea, a fleet of metal ships lingered at a distance, well beyond the range of any previous punishment meted out to Mavis’s enemies.

The giant knew what they believed. They thought they were beyond his wrath. They thought his hunger could not reach them. They thought themselves safe.

So, by will alone, he disabused them of that notion.

The jagged horns crowning his head flashed, gathering power, and then six bolts of lightning roared across the distance.

Each bolt was as thick as a house and bright enough to turn night into day in a single instant. They struck six of the larger vessels.

Every ship absorbed enough energy to equal a small earthquake. Their hulls sublimated, converting their own mass into low-yield explosions.

Those blasts flowered into fiery mushroom clouds. Though the clouds rose only a little higher than the giant himself, they were more than enough to cripple the ships’ escorts and kill a considerable portion of their crews.

Thirty thousand lives vanished in an instant, feeding the fire of the giant’s growth.

Hundreds of aircraft scrambled into the air to answer his advance, while tens of thousands of vehicles crawled across the ground.

The giant ignored the vehicles.

As for the aircraft, he used his power to stop them from breathing fire.

The combustion reactions driving their flight were snuffed out, and the aircraft began to lose control.

Moments later, they fell from the sky in swarms, slamming into the earth and erupting in small explosions.

A cluster of faster, smaller flying machines came streaking toward the giant’s position.

Unlike the slower craft, he could sense the power within these. He could guess the nature of their weapons.

Like certain long-range curses, they could kill everything within an area and leave the ground lightly tainted… but that would deny the giant the satisfaction of dealing with these insects himself.

So he unleashed lightning and destroyed all but one of them.

The last fast little insect flew to within less than a giant’s span of his chest.

Then everything within two hundred kilometers drowned in brilliant, burning annihilation.

The weapon’s power was vast enough to drive the giant one step backward and leave an unpleasant warmth across his skin.

Then the giant opened his mouth and exhaled.

His crimson breath merged into the mushroom cloud and scattered it, bending the blast’s force along the air currents so that both the explosion’s faint poison and the crimson mist itself spread far farther than either could have on its own.

Then the giant continued forward.

More earthquakes rolled outward with each of his steps, and his body grew taller.

More crimson breath seeped into the winds.

The lightning in the crown of horns above his head struck distant targets that did not lie directly in his path.

Entropy and radiation saturated everything nearby.

Slowly, steadily, this relentless and unstoppable incarnation of magical destruction advanced toward the greater population centers to the north.

With each step he took after that, the swelling fear, terror, and despair of the locals fed him—because now they knew their strongest weapon had failed.

Lightning as thick as houses twisted through the air in blatant defiance of physics, scorching trails across the sky as it homed in on me.

The bolts struck with the force of missiles, then released enough energy to power an entire nation for days before finally hissing away into nothing.

I was temporarily immune to electricity, but the shock waves punched through all my defenses, rattled my bones, and ruptured my eardrums.

Dizzy and disoriented, I barely forced out an Instant Flight and slipped away from a river-sized stream of crimson fog.

Then a hand the size of a football field appeared in front of me, blocking my path.

I tried to Time Leap, but I could not activate the ability before that enormous palm clipped me at a combined speed several times faster than sound.

Boom!

By the time my inner ears regenerated and stopped ringing, my head still felt as if it had struck a solid wall, and the rest of me felt like one giant bruise.

I crawled out of the crater I had punched into the bedrock and found myself half a kilometer south of the ruins of Sanguang City.

I launched myself into the air and saw the enemy’s colossal, truly mountain-sized body several kilometers to the north.

Right. Letting him swat me like that again would be bad.

Our city had become a wasteland. The ground shook and split beneath the endless tremors, and the cracks and gullies were filling with rainwater, mud, and corrosive red slime. Countless writhing things were growing out of that muck.

I flew over the ruins, two guided and amplified photon beams cutting and burning through the endless unnatural living tendrils and half-human, half-plant creatures.

Just seeing our home reduced to this stirred a fury in me unlike anything I had ever felt, and I charged them at full speed.

It felt wonderful to cut loose in an open space.

Every time I accelerated with everything I had, darkness or red crept into the edges of my vision.

I strafed left and right, and the monsters became clouds of green-black mist as I passed. At first, it felt like flying through wet paper. As I kept getting faster, it became more like being struck by larger and larger water balloons.

Something bigger and rounder than countless pod-people, with far more tentacles, rose up ahead of me. I hit it so hard it burst apart, and my fist ached from the impact.

Then I laughed, my heart hammering in my chest, my whole body warm and delighted, and plunged back into the swarm of plant monsters, tearing them apart with my bare hands.

…What am I doing?

The thought cut through the pleasure of smashing through another pack of pod-people. Just by looking at them, force beams and energy beams sliced open their plant-like bodies.

I was killing monsters, and it was fun.

But why? Why did it feel fun?

Was there any reason beyond that?

The questions would not go away. They grew like the plants themselves. Whether I tore them out or ignored them, more sprang up in their place.

I stopped in the middle of a punch. Ahead of me, a mass of writhing tendrils spat acid-coated spikes, while my eye beams burned through it almost absentmindedly.

I looked around and saw more than two dozen things like it growing from the rapidly forming swamp. Glowing, almost luminous green water pooled in the fissures opened by the earthquakes, feeding new growth.

Everywhere I could see, fresh spikes, mouths, and poison were emerging. I shook my head once, twice, and felt something rattle inside my skull before falling away with the sound of shattering glass.

Then I could think clearly again.

Compulsion magic!

No. Not compulsion magic. My emotions had been tampered with, not my thoughts.

For a little while, aggression had become the only thing that mattered.

I had been fighting the newly born monsters in a frenzy, reveling in adrenaline roaring through my veins, wasting time killing endless swarms one by one while the source of the enemy moved farther and farther away.

The stench of rot and old blood hung thick in the air. Though the ground was mostly green and black, the air and rain were blood-red.

The red liquid clung to me from head to toe, hissing uselessly against my almost-invulnerable skin… or at least, what I had thought was invulnerable.

The enemy was not only trying to kill us.