Chapter 49: 49: Giant Slayer
TIm the middle of a crater on the island of bones, there was a singular figure kneeling down with a sword used to support his weight.
There was a singular undamaged coat around his body, while his exposed skin was burned and charred. He had no hair on his face and his skin popped in various places.
Despite the biting pain assaulting the man, he managed to raise a shaky hand, summoning a piece of paper from thin air.
[Main objective: Slay the Godsworn.]
[Scenarios: 4/4]
[Time remaining: 6 minutes.]
’How long have I been here? I can barely move.’ Harley’s body shook as he quietly waited for the time to be over.
All around him there were the parts of the young giant that he just killed. And how did he know that it was a giant?
{You have killed a scheme 9 creature; New born giant}
’The three godsworn, the leviathan, the dragon, and the giant. So this an offspring of the giant, a new born.’ he opened his mouth slowly, causing the skin by his lips to tear a little.
The stinging pain made him close his mouth after letting out a breath.
Harley reflected on the entire trial, and he had to admit, that something like this never came to his mind or his imagination, as a possibility for his life.
Also, now knowing that this creature was a newborn, was the worst discovery ever. It’s powers were insidious and abnormal, perhaps it was no exaggeration that it was kin of a god.
For a new born creature to be able to kill thousands of undead creatures and be able project beams that could wipe a city from its eye, it was a terrible experience.
*Brah!*
Hearing a thud, Harley’s eyes moved to the side. There, he saw a person rolling down into the crater with a battered body.
Vernox ultimately stopped as he hit Harley.
"Ow..." He stared down at Vernox, who jad not yet transformed back completely to a normal human.
Vernox’s split eyes stared back at him with a tranquil calmness, and the young man only smiled.
"I guess we did it." He nodded.
Harley himself didn’t have the ability to smile, much less move as he is. It also seemed that Vernox didn’t know the extent of how hurt he was.
Both of his arms were blown off and although it bled slowly, he was still losing blood rapidly. His skin was already getting pale.
"You look like fried fish." Vernox spoke, trying to crack a joke.
"Oh, um... You look like a fish." Harley chuckled silently, and Vernox only scoffed.
The both of them remain still for a few moments, however the ground started to quake all around them.
Vernox’s eyes widened as he stared at the distance beside Harley. Before them, a huge shadow covered the entire island that they were on.
Harley couldn’t see, so he looked at Vernox who was on the ground with worry in his tone.
"What is happening?" He mumbled in a low tone, moving his lips ever so slightly.
Vernox wasn’t able to speak, he was shaking with fear. All of a sudden he rolled, knocking Harley to the ground.
Harley squirmed in pain as he reached the ground, but then he was facing up, and he saw what casted the shadow on the island.
There was a collosal creature with the body of a human standing by the side of the island. Nearly half of its legs were submerged in the water, but it still blocked out the sun.
"Three times... No, ten times the size of this island." Vernox spoke, and Harley summoned the paper of his world record once again.
The ground trembled violently beneath them, each quake growing stronger and more frequent, as if the very bones of the island were fracturing under an unimaginable weight. Harley lay on his back now, his charred body screaming in protest with every tremor that jolted through him.
The coat that somehow remained mostly intact clung to his torso like a shroud, the fabric stiff with dried blood and ash.
Vernox had gone completely silent beside him, his split eyes wide and unblinking, fixed on the monstrous silhouette that now dominated the sky.
Harley could feel it before he fully processed the sight: a pressure so immense it pressed down on his chest like an invisible mountain. The air itself grew thick, heavy, and suffocating.
High above, impossibly high, the colossal giant loomed. Its leg alone was a continent of flesh and sinew, ridged with ancient scars and pulsing veins thicker than rivers. The foot—if one could even call something that vast a "foot"—hung suspended over nearly half the island, its shadow swallowing craters, bone piles, and the distant remains of the battlefield in perfect darkness. The toes alone looked large enough to flatten a house.
Time seemed to stretch and distort as they waited for the trial to end.
Six minutes?
It might as well have been six lifetimes.
Every second dragged like molasses. Harley’s breath came in shallow, ragged gasps. The pain in his face and arms dulled into a deep, nauseating throb, but now a new terror clawed at his mind: the slow, inevitable descent of that titanic foot.
The giant did not move with haste. It simply... lowered.
A low, building roar rose from the horizon as the colossal sole started its final descent toward the island. Wind howled outward in a hurricane gale, ripping loose bones and debris into the sky. The temperature spiked as compression heated the atmosphere beneath the descending mass.
Harley panicked, but he couldn’t even show it. His eyes—burned and bloodshot—refused to look away.
"Vernox..." he whispered, voice cracking like brittle charcoal. "How much... time?"
Vernox didn’t answer. He was frozen, mouth slightly open, staring upward in mute horror.
The paper flickered into existence once more above Harley’s face, trembling in the violent wind.
[Time remaining: 1 minute 17 seconds.]
The giant’s foot continued its merciless descent. It was still thousands of meters above them, yet already the pressure made Harley’s ears pop. His lungs struggled to expand. The ground beneath his back began to buckle and groan, cracks spiderwebbing outward from the crater’s center.
Harley could now see individual details on the sole of the foot now: deep crevices, ridges of calloused skin the size of mountain ranges, and what looked like entire ecosystems of barnacles and strange glowing parasites clinging to the underside. The sheer scale made his mind rebel. This was no longer a creature. This was a moving cataclysm.
His body started to feel... wrong.
A strange tingling pressure built inside his skull. At first he thought it was just fear, or blood loss. Then it intensified—sharp, squeezing, as if invisible hands were gripping his brain and slowly tightening.
"Vernox..." Harley tried again, but his voice came out thin and wet.
The foot was already too close this time, and then it crashed on the island, pressing the surrounding space and meeting them within the crater.
It felt like Harley’s skull was being compressed from every direction at once. His vision blurred at the edges, colors bleeding together. A high-pitched whine filled his ears, drowning out even the thunderous wind.
Then the pain hit him, it was unlike anything he had ever experienced.
Harley’s eyes bulged. A guttural, animalistic shout tore from his throat—raw, broken, and far louder than his damaged body should have allowed.
"AAAAAAGHHHH—!"
The sound was wet and cracking, as though something inside his throat had split. Blood sprayed from his mouth in a fine mist. The pressure inside his head became unbearable, a white-hot vice crushing his brain against the inside of his skull. He could feel the vessels bursting one by one—tiny pops of agony blooming behind his eyes, in his sinuses, deep in the soft tissue of his cerebrum.
All of a sudden all sound seemed to frown out, and even the world itself went black.
Harley opened his eyes to see himself standing on a white concrete-like surface. He turned around, seeing Vernox standing beside him.
"Is it over?" He mumbled, checking his entire body for burns and scars, but he didn’t see anyone—it was all gone.
"Where are we?" He looked at Vernox, who still had those two black horns on his head.
Vernox didn’t answer, simply letting out a sigh.
"We are in a subspace. Wardens say that a door would appear and we’ll be able to leave." Vernox spoke, looking at Harley now.
Harley’s as also looking at him, occasionally his eyes would flicker to the horns on his head.
"You’re a Dragonkin? You’re a prince?" Harley’s face was full of confusion as he stared at the young man in front of him.
"I guess we all have our secrets, Harlequin. What about you, are you undead or something?" Vernox asked back, making Harley speechless.
The fact that Harley wasn’t human was something even he didn’t know for himself.
All of a sudden the omnipresent voice of the Oracle reverberated all around the space they were at.
{You are getting evaluated.}
