Chapter 466: The Fall of the Giants

Ambrose had, of course, fought formidable creatures before.

He'd even taken on a dragon once, and hadn't been particularly impressed.

But these three giants gave him an entirely different impression. They were smaller in scale than a dragon, perhaps, but radiated far more danger than dragons had ever made Ambrose feel.

And a diviner's instincts were rarely wrong.

The instant the fight began, Arthur took a direct hit from a horizontal sweep of a greatsword and went flying through the air for a solid dozen meters.

He recovered almost immediately, stabilizing himself and re-engaging the giant without missing a beat.

He was, after all, Arthur Lyon.

The other two giants showed no restraint, either. The one wielding a hammer had fixed his sights on Ariel, apparently eager to settle the question of whose hammer hit harder.

That left the axe-wielder to come charging at Ambrose alone.

The great axe swung through the air, trailing furious lightning, howling wind, and an aura of sheer cataclysmic violence.

Ambrose froze in place, as though paralyzed with fear. But when the axe split his body in two, there was nothing but a hazy afterimage, mist where a man should have been.

In that single instant, he had cast Blur, Mirror Image, and Mist Step all at once.

Thanks to the elven queen's gift, he possessed the power of a legendary ranger. Not only had it sharpened his aim, it had also accelerated his casting speed considerably.

The axe buried itself deep in the ground, lodging there, before the charging giant tore it free and came at Ambrose once more.

Ambrose was genuinely relieved this axe-wielder hadn't picked up any of Gareth's chain-blade tricks. If he could yank his weapon free and immediately hurl it again with a flick of the wrist, Ambrose would have spent the entire fight running himself ragged.

He cast Mist Step again and reappeared directly behind the giant. Spells this minor cost him essentially nothing at this point. With a flick of his wrist, he cast Haste twice, once for Arthur and the other for Ariel.

Their formation had effectively been blown apart by the giants' charge, but Ambrose continued playing his role as the mage regardless.

This was the polish of a veteran adventurer at work.

A proper warrior-mage-cleric trio didn't mean the warrior simply absorbed every hit while the mage and cleric stood safely behind him, calmly casting spells.

In actual adventuring, no warrior could ever truly shield a mage completely. Sneak attacks, sudden charges, and every kind of unforeseen complication had a way of breaking up even the most disciplined formation.

And in that situation, what was a mage supposed to do? Standing there waiting to be rescued was practically asking to die.

All mages who'd survived more than a few years on the job understood exactly how to handle a chaotic battlefield. Unless they specialized in force-based magic with built-in friendly-fire immunity, their role was primarily support.

Mist Step kept him darting across the field, flinging support spells one after another.

Haste bolstered his allies. Blindness, Charm, Petrify—he ran through a battery of control spells just to gauge their effect.

The results were embarrassing. These giants apparently had absurdly high resistances, and every single control spell failed outright.

In fact, on closer observation, Ambrose realized that they weren't ordinary living creatures at all.

Their bodies seemed to be made of the same material as the archway: pitted and uneven, but practically indestructible. Even Arthur's longsword barely scratched the surface. Ariel's lightning fared no better. These giants could move freely in storms, and were utterly indifferent to whether her hammer was charged or not.

Speed, at least, was on their side. The axe-wielder couldn't keep pace with Ambrose's repeated Mist Steps, and eventually gave up on him entirely. He charged instead toward Ariel, apparently intent on dealing with the seemingly weakest target first.

"Massive frame, high resistance, high brute strength... but that doesn't necessarily mean there are no weaknesses."

Calmly, Ambrose cast a spell directly into the giant's charging path: Grease.

A wide patch of yellow oil exploded outward, coating a stretch of ground roughly a dozen meters across.

The axe-wielder planted a foot directly in it, lost all control of his body, and crashed down hard onto his backside. The impact shook the ground, and his axe even slipped loose from his grip mid-fall.

No amount of resistance helped against Grease. The spell didn't care about magical defenses. If you couldn't keep your footing, you went down.

Just to be safe, Ambrose threw in two dice of fate as well, ensuring the giant's fall.

His axe landed conveniently right in front of Ambrose.

Without hesitating, Ambrose cast Featherfall and Mage Hand simultaneously and tucked the enormous weapon directly into his private space.

Disarmed, the giant was instantly half as threatening as before.

The axe-wielder struggled to rise. His body was simply too massive, every movement clumsy and overextended, and he spent a good while floundering in the oil slick without success.

Ambrose laughed. The giants' bulk rendered them weak to basic physics and made them easy to unbalance.

He was about to send the other giants sprawling the same way when a flash of holy light from Arthur's direction sent a stinging jolt through Ambrose's own body.

When the light faded, the greatsword-wielding giant lay collapsed on the ground.

A deep gash ran across its head, a wound that would have split a human skull clean in two, though for a giant, it probably amounted to nothing worse than a scalp wound.

And yet, inexplicably, the giant lay twitching on the ground, as though it had suffered grievous harm.

Arthur called out loudly, "They're undead! A very particular kind of undead, but my holy light can still affect them!"

What kind of undead could take a beam of Arthur Lyon's holy light to the skull and still not die? Just how terrifying were these creatures?

As Arthur moved in to finish the kill, Ambrose shouted across the platform, "Arthur, go help Ariel! Leave the undead to me!"

Though puzzled, Arthur didn't waste time arguing. He flashed to Ariel's side, and the two of them worked together against the last, hammer-wielding giant.

Ambrose, meanwhile, flashed directly to the twitching giant's side and pressed his palm against the gaping wound on its head.

As he pulled his hand back, a translucent thread came with it.

This was the giant's soul, the heroic spirit of the arena itself.

The moment Ambrose made contact with it, he understood its structure instantly. It wasn't just a single soul, but rather a confluence of countless souls all bound together, every one of them a warrior who had died bravely in combat.

Every fighter who had ever died in this arena persisted in exactly this form as a fusion of courage and fury, stripped down to nothing but their combat-related memories. Their power came precisely from that purity.

But no matter how powerful a heroic spirit might be, it was still, fundamentally, a soul. With the giant's body utterly unable to resist, Ambrose drew the giant's soul out thread by thread, completely stripping the giant of any ability to move.

"Excellent."

The heroic spirit itself was the prize Ambrose had come for, so he extracted the soul with exceptional care, ensuring it would emerge perfectly intact, exactly as it had originally been.

With its soul removed, the once-mighty giant could no longer so much as twitch.

By then, the fight was effectively over. Having discovered the giants' fundamental weakness, the trio faced no subsequent difficulty at all.

Arthur and Ambrose pressed their advantage.

The fight ended quickly: the hammer-wielding giant fell beneath Arthur's holy light, and Ambrose flashed in to extract its soul as well. By then, the last one had only just managed to drag himself out of the oil slick.

He hadn't been all that slow; rather, Arthur and Ambrose were simply impossibly fast. The seamless coordination between a paladin and a lich was, frankly, something close to a miracle.

With his weapon long gone, the last giant posed no threat whatsoever. The three of them brought him down together in a matter of seconds.

All three giants' souls were extracted, and their bodies stowed away in Ambrose's private space. By any measure, this was a complete victory.

But reflecting on it now, Ambrose couldn't help but feel a slight chill. If Arthur's holy light hadn't been able to counter their undead nature, he and Ariel would genuinely have struggled to do these giants any meaningful harm at all.

If Ambrose had tried reaching in to extract a soul without that advantage, a single open-handed slap from one of the giants could have pulverized him on the spot.

Ambrose said, with a note of realization, "I think I finally understand how this race ended up offending Thanos."

Ariel, still quietly reproaching herself for her performance in the fight, couldn't help asking out of curiosity, "Master Megaman, what exactly do you mean by that?"

"I mean, I have a fairly good idea now of how the civilization of these giants came to an end. Every time they held one of these trials, countless warriors died in the arena. Their souls would keep strengthening the constructs guarding it, and their corpses would be absorbed to reinforce those same constructs' bodies.

"The natural result is obvious: the more contests are held, the stronger the trial's monsters became—and the stronger the monsters, the more heroes would die. Eventually, the giants must have discovered that even their strongest warriors, fighting together, couldn't defeat the monsters anymore. After that, no one could ever pass the trials again..."

Thanos's projection appeared once more before the group as Ambrose spoke.

His towering shape loomed over the three of them, his eyes alone larger than all three giants combined.

Thanos's voice boomed down from the heavens.

"Correct! They all died in that arena, because unlike you, they didn't have nearly so many tricks up their sleeves. And that, incidentally, is exactly why I favored them over you."

Ambrose wasn't particularly surprised. His bracelet had gone dark the moment the fight began.

Of course Thanos wouldn't have missed a battle like this. His sudden appearance now was hardly unexpected.

Thanos spoke with evident nostalgia. "Endlessly fighting, endlessly growing stronger... They had already unified their entire world, and still they chose to forge ever-greater foes from their own flesh and blood and souls. Never once indulging in comfort, forever burning with the joy of combat—that is precisely the kind of people I love best. In the end, they created constructs even they themselves could no longer overcome, but I admired their effort regardless. So I brought every giant still living into my divine realm. There, they shall enjoy eternal life!

"What a pity that those who came after them never carried that same spirit."

"This is just bloodlust dressed up as devotion," Ambrose thought to himself. An entire civilization's heroes, generation after generation, throwing their lives away for nothing but a god's amusement, and forging chains for their own descendants in the process. Even if they were granted eternal life as a reward, Thanos's divine realm was famously bleak and desolate. What was the point of spending an eternity like that?

Ambrose found the whole philosophy genuinely incomprehensible, though this confession from Thanos had at least cleared up several lingering mysteries.

The giants had once ruled the world. The golden desert that existed today was presumably where they had once lived, which would explain the staggering quantity of gold there, since the wealth of the entire world had once belonged to them.

But gold, for them, had only ever been a tool for ritual offerings and decoration. The giants hadn't been obsessed with luxury, but rather with combat.

Acting on Thanos's wishes, they had built the Arena of Storms and thrown themselves into centuries of relentless bloodshed.

Ambrose suspected most of the giants had simply been warriors at heart, without finesse or subtlety. They simply swung axes in the most primal way imaginable. Against any opponent stronger, tougher, or more skilled than them, the contestants in the arena were doomed from the start.

To Ambrose, this seemed like nothing but a vicious cycle. To the giants, apparently, this had been the entire purpose of existence.

In the end, there was no telling how many had died before the entire race finally earned its place in the divine realm.

That explained why those underground cities had all been empty, without a single corpse to be found anywhere and only mountains of gold left behind. They hadn't died in the conventional sense, and they hadn't migrated elsewhere either. They had ascended into a god's realm en masse—and gold simply held no meaning for them anymore, so there had been no reason to take any of it along.

Everything fit together now. Ambrose hadn't expected that such a magnificent civilization would have ultimately destroyed itself.

But none of that mattered at the moment. Ambrose turned back to Thanos. "So, great Lord of Storms, what reward do I get to claim this time?"

Thanos laughed. "You just stole every heroic spirit this arena had to offer, and now you're asking me for a reward?"

"Spoils of war are sacred and inviolable. Isn't that one of your own tenets, Lord of Storms?" Ambrose was fully prepared to start haggling when he frowned.

"Wait, what exactly did you mean by that just now? Are you saying these three heroic spirits were the only ones left in the entire arena?"

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