There were really quite a lot of bones, and so very few of them were in even half-decent condition. It looked less like the lair of a large animal and more like…What, exactly? Bodies from people killed by industrial machinery? An artillery crater? The lair of a serial killer with a sledgehammer?

"Giant's lair." Vari noted, confidently. "Look at these bones, entire bites have been taken clean out of them. Like they were soft bread, even, no resistance at all, and the width of the jaws…Definitely a giant's lair."

Huh. Looked like the Idiot was good for something, after all. Emma decided not to let him know.

She'd slipped her ring on already, which made conversation somewhat difficult. It was almost a danger to trip her allies up by mistake, almost a danger to trip herself up, actually, with the odd, detached way in which she seemed to be sifting through the world.

But of course the real danger was that they were marching their way into probably the deadliest location in several dozen miles, and that was hardly optional on their part. Weapons drawn, nerves steeled, they delved deeper into the darkness. Maybe their courage deserved some kind of praise, or reward, but life just wasn't that cool. Instead of getting either, they got caught.

The first warning was also the last warning, a voice behind them. It wasn't human. Wasn't remotely human, as far from anything anthropomorphic as an ocean was from a puddle. Emma just about shit herself at it, and spun around as fast as everyone else did.

What was waiting for Emma's eyes behind her struck the strength from her. Courage didn't exist, not really. She'd gone her whole life thinking otherwise, kept that misconception through a dozen life-or-death struggles and two attempted executions. One glance at the giant Thrudvarg killed it stone dead.

It was the biggest biped she'd ever seen, taller than Groygar by at least a metre and wider by even more. The thing seemed sort of hunched, despite the fact, and its shoulders were practically jagged with muscle. The skin covering its body was grey and pitted, lines etched deep into it like the very ravine they were standing in. All over Emma saw tiny notches and indentations, places, she thought, where blades had found the hide with impossible force and still failed to penetrate. Some areas were covered by scar tissue, and whatever attacks had managed to leave a scar in something like this were beyond her imagination entirely.

Every time it moved, Emma felt like she was staring up at the base of a cliff and watching boulders shift before a fall. Muscles thicker than her whole body bulged and twitched like the pistons in a giant machine, and wrist-thick fingers curled inwards tightly enough to crush stone.

Or me.

The face was what truly got Emma, though. It looked like ten other faces cut apart and pressed together. In scale, in shape, in constitution. She shivered as the lips peeled back to reveal jagged knives of yellow enamel poking up from the gumline.

"Hello humans, my name is Thrudvarg. What brings you to my home?"

That it took so long for the giant's words to sink into Emma's mind was probably a solid example of just how fucked she was. Something about it just radiated danger. Impossibility. It felt wrong to see something this big move and talk, uncanny. Like reality itself was…

So help me god, I'm past talking about reality glitches now.

"H-hello." Emma said at last, needing to force her throat to do its work and finding every muscle nearby grinding and jumping against the effort.

The giant didn't say anything, didn't even look at her. Emma saw it frown, blink, then…Then, at last, its eyes met hers.

My ring.

She'd kept the ring on, Emma realised, and…It was looking at her.

"That's a very interesting trinket," The giant noted, "But it's rude to speak while magically hiding yourself. Would you mind taking it off, since it's my own home we're conversing in?"

Emma did mind, actually. The idea of exposing herself to this creature was about as appealing as the notion of chewing off her own feet. But denying its request seemed more likely to get her killed than either, so she obeyed.

"That's better." The creature smiled, or at least Emma thought it smiled. It was somewhat hard to tell, the thing's mouth seemed so…weaponized.

"Sorry for…Intruding like this." Emma replied, finding her words at last and finding herself almost horrified to watch them tumble uselessly out. Fighting this creature was certainly not on the cards, her attempts at finding something able to weaken Groygar had gone somewhat too far. If she couldn't talk herself out of whatever attack was coming, the attack would quite simply kill her, kill her allies, and kill any artillery crews who happened to be watching from afar. There was nothing more to it than that.

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The giant smiled wider. God, its mouth was so fucking big. Emma kept thinking she'd seen the limits of its width and it kept just stretching apart even farther than before. Forget knives, those teeth were looking like shortswords.

"My name is Thrudvarg." It repeated , voice hitting Emma and rolling on around her like the sound of thunder descending a height. "And this is, as you noticed, my territory. What are you doing here?"

Emma thought of many things to say, all of them unappealing for one reason or another.

"To…Speak with you?"

Even to fucking her, it sounded weak. Turned out a lifetime of making excuses to avoid unemployment wasn't very applicable when you genuinely feared for your life. She'd have hoped her escape at the sacrificial altar would've been of more use, but even that, somehow, was not as terrifying in so primal a way as this monster.

"Wonderful, I do so love visitors. Would you care to join me in my home?"

Emma glanced behind her at the home in question, a giant cave. It was very tempting to say no, of course, but then that might get the killing started right away. On the other hand saying yes might mean being led into some kind of trap down below.

But she was already at this thing's mercy, a trap really couldn't do much to worsen things. Her odds could hardly dip lower than zero. And if Thrudvarg got confident and relaxed because it thought it was getting what it wanted, then that disadvantage would suddenly become an edge for Emma. At least until they reached the actual trap.

So she could strike on the way.

And yet as they went deeper, that prospect seemed less and less promising. Simply spending time around this thing gnawed away at Emma's nerves. What certainly did not help was what it said next.

"You're nervous, aren't you?" Thrudvarg asked.

Emma's first instinctive response was to turn and sprint for the exit in an instant, her first conscious one was to take another glance at the giant's legs and the way it seemed to not even feel its own weight, before realising that she would not get even a quarter of the way there. So instead she swallowed, and spoke.

"I am."

Thrudvarg looked somewhat sad at that, frowning gently but not with any great anger.

"Lots of people are. I'm aware of how I look to your kind, and if I wasn't I'd soon be made aware when the next batch of humans came to kill me for it, but I can assure you I mean you no harm. I only eat people who try to burn my home and end my life."

Emma paused at that, reconsidered pretty much all the information she thought she'd gathered about this creature—this person—and then…sighed. She would have felt embarrassed, if her emotional centres weren't pretty much shot.

"Sorry." Emma managed at last, seeing the giant smile and…shrug.

"You're only human."

Despite the pleasantries, Emma did not let her guard down. But she also didn't attack while they were on their way to the supposed trap. Now that the odds of this all being more genuine seemed so much higher, she figured she'd be reducing her likelihood of surviving the day no matter what she did.

In the end, they didn't get eaten in a dark, horrible cave. And they actually found quite a nice place awaiting them farther down inside it.

The chamber was ridiculously big, a hemisphere expanding out from the tunnel they'd followed for dozens of metres in every direction. That answered the great mystery of why a four-metre giant would live underground at least.

"I hope you all make yourselves comfortable." The giant smiled, heading towards a large slab that Emma took several moments to realise was some kind of table. Several stones were quickly moved around it, all flat-topped and looking about perfect height for a human to sit atop. The larger table-slap was slanted, so that one end rested much higher than the other. Emma realised it had been ground down to let the giant sit alongside more ordinary-sized guests.

"I have some food on," Thrudvarg explained, "it shouldn't be more than a few minutes from now in cooking, all of you just relax here and I'll go and get it."

That left Emma and her party alone, and every single one of them exhaled the moment they were. All at once.

"Holy shit." Emma whispered. "Holy fuck, that was…Fuck."

"I'm shaking." Aexilica blinked. "I've actually fought a Demigod, and I'm shaking, what was that?"

Vari seemed the least affected, perhaps shielded by his stupidity.

"It's different in battle." He noted. "Combat gives you outlet for fear, makes it sink less deeply."

Another thought occurred to Emma at that.

"Shouldn't we… Nevermind."

The giant was back remarkably quickly, despite the distance they'd all walked. Yet another victory for the long-legs-havers of the world. What was more surprising than that, though, was the great mass of meat he carried over his shoulder.

Emma didn't know what the animal was, or rather what it had been. It must have been smaller now than when it first lived, which was a ridiculous proposition because it seemed easily double the size of any bull carcass she'd practiced her magic on. The steaming thing was dropped down onto the smooth stone, and the giant withdrew a great jagged rock from beneath it.

"I'll carve." Thrudvarg told everyone, before beginning to do so. "I believe this tends to be seen as woman's work among your kind anyway."

"You're a woman?" Vari frowned, staring at her with open, unhidden shock and just a shade of disgust. Emma wanted to kick him—wanted to kick his entire gender, for that matter, simply out of jealousy at how unguarded their faces got to be—but the giant was speaking before any feet could find any shins.

"I am." The giant explained, deftly slicing through meat and gristle. Emma noted that her hands did not need to do any sort of sawing at all, they merely pressed down and the tissues came apart. Another casual demonstration of her strength, as if Emma had needed any more.

Vari's frown deepened. "But—"

He yelped at that, a high, strangled noise. It was, Emma thought, almost as if someone had fired a ball of yellow hardlight the size of someone's thumb across the table fast enough to wind him mid-word. Vari's gushing asshole of a mouth was quickly consumed by the effort of drawing in spasmodic lungfuls of air rather than insulting the indestructible giant. A great improvement.

"Alright my lovelies." Thrudvarg beamed, looking a great deal less monstrous now that Emma's imagination wasn't being left to go so wild in interpreting every twitch of her face. "It's time to eat." Plates of carved glass were laid out before them all, and great steaming slabs of meat dropped onto each one. Emma thought the giantess was rather overestimating a human stomach.

But she was actually hungry.

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