A rain of crimson spears, as if steeped in fresh blood, poured down—one after another ripping open the sky, detonating across the bone-armored giant's body like artillery, dazzling and cruel.
They punched through the mana defense coating its hide. Explosive force tore open what should have been an unbreakable shell, shredding the knotted muscle beneath into flying gore. Dark-violet blood splashed down like a storm. Shards of bone armor, mixed with chunks of flesh, rained from above, piling into a grisly tableau amid the wreckage.
A swift azure sword-light cleaved through the blaze. The bone-armored giant didn't just stand there and take it—it swung its greatsword and hacked at Scáthach.
That blade made Scáthach think of Ig-Alima in Gilgamesh's treasury—said to have been the war god Zababa's weapon in Mesopotamian myth. If that was true, then Zababa must've been about the same size as the bone-armored giant before her.
It didn't carry the "horizon" concept of separating heaven and earth the way Ig-Alima supposedly did, but its sheer mass alone promised catastrophic destruction. And in the bone-armored giant's hands—driven by extreme speed—the drawn-out sword-light blurred into bands of radiance. Each swing came with the force to split mountains and sever rivers.
A single slash through open air could churn the winds and clouds, wringing a pained shriek from the atmosphere. When it came down toward the ground, it tore rock layers apart in an instant, carving out bottomless ravines.
Scáthach shot through sky-choking dust and the howling gale like an arrow. Her toe skimmed along the jagged back of the giant's hand, and her spear erupted with blazing crimson aura. With a sharp throw, she drew a searing arc through the air—then the instant it struck the giant's arm, the blast-flare swallowed the whole limb. Bone-armor shards flew like a rain of stars.
"GRAAAAH—!!"
The bone-armored giant roared in pain. The surging soundwave hit like a tsunami, whipping Scáthach's dark-violet hair into a frenzy of banners. Strands swept across her faintly reddened cheeks, setting off those increasingly incandescent Mystic Eyes.
"Tough as nails—good." Scáthach's grin turned feral with excitement. "Looks like I'll need to stab you a few more times." She produced a brand-new crimson spear, its tip trembling with a hungry hum.
She sprinted up the giant's arm, thick as a stone pillar—and then she sprang. Turning elegantly in midair, sleeves and hem flaring, she hurled the spear with all her strength. It ripped the air with a piercing shriek and smashed down like a blood-red cannon shot into the knuckles gripping the sword.
BOOOOOM!
The exploding crimson meteor flared with blinding light, igniting its bracer—and blasting two fingers clean off.
"What's wrong? What's wrong?" Scáthach taunted, voice bright with relish. "Already spent? Your mana defense is way weaker now. Slacking off that fast? Where'd all that swagger go—the one you used to butcher that kid's shadow soldiers? Come on—roar for me again!"
"LET ME HEAR IT!"
Using the recoil of her throw, Scáthach shot higher into the air. She spun lightly, twisted at the waist, and hurled another killing spear. The crimson comet scythed through the atmosphere and slammed into the giant's lower jaw, erupting into a brutal bloom of light.
BOOOOOM!
The hit snapped the mountain-sized head violently backward. Its twin scarlet eyes shuddered like candles in the wind, and for the first time, disbelief—and panic—flickered in that savage gaze.
Even as she fell through open air with nothing to brace against, Scáthach became a living machine gun, hurling dozens of crimson spears in rapid succession. Those burning, charging meteors detonated into sun-bright rings across the giant's shoulders, throat, chest, armpits, waist, thighs, and feet. Aside from the eye region she deliberately avoided—the weakness—nearly every part of that mountain of flesh suffered Scáthach's annihilating blows.
"ROOOOAAARGH!!"
The bone-armored giant roared with brittle bravado and grabbed a broken stone pillar from beside its feet, hurling it straight at Scáthach. The fragments did hit her—only to be pierced through in a blink. She rode her spear's momentum into a streak of red, thrusting right up to the giant's face. At the last instant she snapped the spear back, and a mana-loaded fist crashed into it.
THUD!
The impact sounded like a warhammer striking a mountain. The giant's vicious face warped grotesquely under the punch. The spillover became a visible, ring-shaped shockwave that blew dust and rubble clean away in an instant.
If it were the bone-armored giant from before—when it could wrap itself in an invisible suit of mana armor—this punch would've done little.
But now, its head visibly caved and twisted from that single blow.
Proof it was at the end of its rope.
Staggering backward, the bone-armored giant slammed into the rock wall behind it. Its legs gave out, and it slumped to the ground. The initial majesty was long gone—now it was simply pathetic. There wasn't a single unbroken patch left on its body. Dark-violet blood ran from countless wounds like little streams, and even those scarlet eyes had dulled.
Then a slow, lazy voice reached its ears—and its eyes snapped wide.
"Get up…"
Like a child waking from a nightmare, seeing something unspeakably terrifying, the bone-armored giant's mountain of a body began to tremble out of control. Split wounds seeped even more dark-violet blood with every shake, as if every muscle were screaming.
"Get up…"
Scáthach approached at an unhurried pace. The click of her heels against stone seemed to overlap, unnaturally, with the giant's frantic heartbeat. In the wavering firelight, her figure faded in and out, as though she'd merged with the shadows themselves—save for those bewitching crimson eyes, blazing bright in the dark like stars.
"Get up… You can still fight, can't you? Then get up. Pick up your weapon."
Terror soaked through the giant's marrow like ice water. It scrambled backward on hands and feet, jagged claws screeching across the wall—only for cold rock to block its escape and seal it inside this cage of despair. All it could do was watch that tiny nightmare draw closer.
Like a human facing a ghost no gun could ever kill, the bone-armored giant had met something beyond its understanding. It couldn't comprehend why—no matter what it did—it couldn't kill this small human…
In the end… was she even human?
After a battle this fierce, she was still calm, still steady—and every one of her strikes carved pain into it, sharp enough to pierce bone.
The longer it fought, the more hopeless it became. Not a single ray of victory in sight.
"What is this?" Scáthach said with a sigh, not caring whether it understood. There was even a hint of helplessness in her tone. "I'm not some devil. And you're shaking this badly in front of a lovely young lady? That's seriously rude."
"Is this really how you want to do it?" she went on. "If you don't struggle a little more, I'm going to kill you—and then take that kid and head to the your Monarch, Legia."
The moment those words left her mouth, the bone-armored giant went rigid, like it had just crashed.
In the Monarchs' eternal war against the Rulers, captured denizens of that chaotic realm—and even defeated Monarchs—were often imprisoned deep within Dungeons by the Rulers. Absolute commands were implanted into them—orders like "kill humans," impossible to disobey. No matter what they truly thought, the instant they saw a human, a voice in their head would drive them relentlessly: kill them all.
So far, only Esil and the other demons in the Demon Castle instance dungeon were different. The voice in their heads wasn't "kill humans," but "protect the Demon Castle."
But the bone-armored giant in front of Scáthach seemed different too… If the command planted in it had been "kill humans," it should've charged straight in from the start and wiped out every intruder. Instead, it held position in the corridor, only moving after most of the other giants were already dead. So Scáthach guessed its order was something like: "Stop anyone from approaching the sealed Monarch, Legia."
Sure enough—when Scáthach said she'd go to Legia's room after killing it, the bone-armored giant sat there as if its soul had been ripped out. Fear of Scáthach clashed with the order the Rulers had carved into its mind.
In the end, the absolute command buried in the deepest layers of its consciousness crushed everything else and seized control.
"ROOOOAAARGH—!!"
As if driven mad, scarlet light flared in its eyes. Its mountain-bulk body sprang high—then that sky-blotting foot, wrapped in ruinous wind pressure, came crashing down.
BOOOOM!!
The stomp hit like a falling meteor. The entire area sank with the blast, and from the impact point outward, the ground shattered inch by inch. Web-like fissures raced away in every direction. Rock heaved up or collapsed down in jagged slabs, while stones and dust erupted like geysers.
Whether it had hit Scáthach or not, the bone-armored giant bent low and hammered both fists down in a storm—indiscriminate, savage—punching crater after crater into the floor.
BOOOOM!
BOOOOM!
BOOOOM!
The endless detonations were deafening. Debris blasted outward in a bullet-hell spray, and the corridor wailed under the onslaught as if it might collapse completely at any moment.
It was basically that scene in One-Punch Man where the giant little brother pummels Saitama.
Suddenly, a crescent of ice-blue sword aura flashed out from an absurdly tricky angle. It sliced through the mana surging around the giant with ease and carved a vicious wound into its forearm—deep enough to show bone.
"A beast cornered can indeed erupt with monstrous power," Scáthach said, her voice like cold springwater striking stone. "You threw away fear when you lost your reason… but at the same time, you threw away your last chance to win. Attacks this sloppy can't threaten me."
She stood proudly amid the swirling dust, like a winter plum refusing to bow in a blizzard. In her hands was no longer the cursed crimson spear, but a two-handed greatsword forged from solid ice—ice-blue from end to end. A bitter chill flowed along the blade, freezing even drifting dust into glittering frost.
"When you're facing an opponent this big…" She turned the sword slightly; ice crystals fell like petals. "A sword feels more practical than a spear."
A stabbing wind packed with killing intent swept down the corridor. Ice crystals filled the air, refracting dreamlike rainbows. And in that beautiful tableau of snow and frost, every drifting flake, every curling thread of cold hid something lethal.
But the bone-armored giant no longer felt any of it. Now it had only one thought: kill the intruder before it. Stop her from passing through and reaching the room at the corridor's end.
A massive palm slammed down with crushing force. Scáthach had already leapt lightly into the air. She turned gracefully in the screaming wind, hair blooming around her like a dark rose in full flower. The enormous ice sword followed her like a bird's wing. She wielded it with effortless ease, every motion carrying a suffocating, elegant rhythm.
A bewitching red flickered in the depths of her eyes—because the mood was perfect, and she couldn't help herself.
"ALL WILL BE REVEALED... IN LUNAR FLAME!"
In the next instant, the silver sheen on the ice blade shattered into crescent-shaped sword waves. They tore the sky apart, as if guided, converging on a single point—the still-unhealed cut on the giant's arm.
When the last—and largest—crescent came down from above, the bone-armored giant's thick arm was severed cleanly. The falling limb smashed a deep crater into the ground. Through the rising dust, the cut surface could be seen sealed under a heavy coat of ice. Biting cold spilled endlessly from the wound; rocks, bloodstains—even the air itself—began to frost over, and in the blink of an eye it became an icebound dead zone.
Losing an arm only intensified the giant's ferocity. With its remaining hand, it snatched up the fallen greatsword and brought it down on Scáthach with the force to cleave heaven and earth.
Facing a strike that could split mountains and rivers alike, Scáthach calmly raised her ice sword.
In the span of less than a breath, time seemed to stretch into eternity.
Ice-blue sword-light extended infinitely into the distance—becoming a blurred, hazy band.
Only when half the greatsword—and the bone-armored giant's head—hit the frozen ground, scattering icy shards, did time finally begin to flow again.
Amid the falling snow, Scáthach exhaled a thin ribbon of white mist. The ice sword in her hands began to fracture, inch by inch from the tip, dissolving into countless glittering motes of light that quietly melted into the ceaseless storm.
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T/N: JINGLIIU??????????