He was easily twenty feet tall. Maybe more. It turns out that I’m not a good judge of distance or height when I’m absolutely terrified. If I’d thought the scale of the room was wrong, the scale of the man was worse. He was an instant headache, as my eyes and my brain desperately tried to whittle him down to a size that made sense, but he just wouldn’t do it. He remained a giant. His every step rattled the room. I’d have had to jump to touch his knees.

  The giant was dressed in fine leather armor and carrying a dagger that would’ve stood taller than any of us. Even his finely made leather armor was disconcerting. I’d been led to believe, owing to all the tales of giants I’d ever read, that they wore primitive rags, or loincloths like Tarzan. Plus they were supposed to carry gnarled clubs, not ornate daggers.

  This man had a finely trimmed mustache. He wore glasses. Leather boots. His voice was cultured. But deafening.

  “Gnats in my room?” he asked. “What intrusion is this?”

  “I’m an officer of Whitewater!” Pig-Face yelled. “Here to apprehend—”

  But at that moment the giant’s leather boot kicked forward. There was a sickening crunch and then Pig-Face was a broken thing, launched as if by a catapult, a dead man in the air, arching over Gerik’s head and passing through the beams of sunlight before landing in the fireplace.

  “Gnats don’t speak,” the giant said. It was calmly delivered. A man stating a fact. Despite this, his voice felt like a series of explosions in the room. I could feel the breeze of his heartbeats.

  “No!” one of Pig-Face’s men yelled, and he charged at the giant with insanity in his eyes. The giant flicked him away with the side of his blade, catching him with a glancing blow that still crushed the man’s head and sent him sprawling along the floor. The giant strode forward and poked down into the fallen man’s chest with his dagger, and then twisted.

  By then one of the remaining men was peppering the giant with what seemed to be an automatic crossbow. Every time he pulled the trigger, a new bolt appeared, cocked and ready to fire. Several of them slammed into the giant, none of them penetrating the leather armor. The giant wiped them away as if they were crumbs from an untidy meal, then reached down and grabbed the man and flung him away. The man smashed into one of the paintings on the wall.

  “Shit,” the giant said. “Dumb. Should’ve thrown him into the fireplace. Damn it.” There was a smear on the painting. The dead man had crashed to the floor, leaving a line of blood all down the wall.

  The rest of the Pig-Face’s group died quickly. I yelled a warning at the woman, because of chivalry, I guess. Just foolishness, in this case.

  She died while casting a swarm of brightly-colored fireballs at the giant. Together, they bounced off the giant’s face, causing no damage past that of setting his mustache on fire. He rubbed at it with the back of his hand, muttering a curse. Then he picked up a log from near the fireplace, a log that was at least a quarter of an entire tree, and simply dropped it on the woman. It made a thud when it hit the floor. There was some squish involved, but mostly it was just the thud. The woman hadn’t mattered much at all.

  The sunlight tracking Gerik vanished when the giant stepped on two more of the men. It was all over in seconds. The giant wasn’t even breathing hard. Despite his calm, he felt like a tornado in the room. He felt like death.

  Gerik yelled at me, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Everything was happening in chunks. Fragments. My ears were still ringing from my idiocy with the lightning bolt.

  I wondered if there was anywhere safe in the room, and found myself thinking of all the roaches that’d scurried away from me whenever I’d found them in the kitchen of my college apartment. But, for me, there wasn’t any handy refrigerator to dive beneath. There weren’t any loose bits of linoleum at the edges of the counter where I could hunker down and hide until the big bad man was gone.

  Gerik ran for cover, attempting to hide behind one of the big bookcases. The giant took steps that ate up the room. Gerik, who I’d thought had plenty of time, barely had a chance to dive behind a bookcase as the giant’s hand slapped against the wall, trying to crush him.

  The giant cursed and began tugging books from the bookcase, tossing them to the floor and then growing impatient before he just heaved the entire bookcase down, so that it toppled to the floor with a resounding crash that knocked me off my feet and caused a sandstorm of dust to wash across me.

  The concussion seemed to clear my ears, so that I could hear Gerik singing a bawdy tune at the top of his lungs. He interrupted his musical tale of a waitress who delivered more than ale to tell me to run for cover while he had the giant distracted. It seemed like a fine idea, so I began running for the door and I’d made it a good twenty feet, perhaps the length of a single stride from the giant, before I realized I was essentially letting Gerik sacrifice his life for mine.

  “This is shit,” I said before foolishly stopping, and then being stupid enough to turn around and charge the giant.

  My heart screamed in my chest and both my hands were clutching my dagger so hard that it hurt, but my legs moved quickly, pounding and churning across the floor, hoping that I could reach the giant before he smashed Gerik into a broken red puddle. I ran staring at the mountain of flesh in front of me, trying to ignore the impressive stats that were hovering in large—and in fact giant—letters above his head.

  Dungeon Giant

  Level: 9  Health points: 142

  Attack Class: 7  Defense Class: 7 (thick skin)

  Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

  Strength: 20 Intelligence: 13 Dexterity: 9

  Charisma: 10 Constitution: 22

  Languages: Common, Giant, Elder One

  Attack (2 per round): 4d6 (punch) 5d6 (stomp) 8d6 (weapon)

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Special Abilities: Bellow (once every three rounds, a Dungeon Giant

  can Bellow as an additional attack: all those within 100 feet must

  save vs. Constitution or be stricken with Fear, unable to act that round.

  Those stricken with Fear are subject to the effects until and

  unless rolling a successful save at the start of the next round)

  “This is shit!” I yelled again, a real-world battle cry. I came up behind the giant just as he was peering behind the fallen bookcase and saying, “There you are, little man.”

  He was squatting as he reached for Gerik.

  I drove my dagger up into his ass. Right behind his balls.

  He let out a horrible screech and tried to leap to his feet, but in his scrambling shock he lost his footing, with his leather boots sliding out from under him, and he began falling backward onto the floor.

  Which was a major fucking problem for me.

  I had the blink of an eye to make a vital decision. Which way to run? My body wanted to outdistance the falling giant, but my mind was shrieking about how that wasn’t possible. I had twenty thousand pounds of incoming weight, and too far to run.

  So instead of running I dove forward in what seemed like an insensible manner, but it saved my life. I was able to hunker myself against the side of the fallen bookcase. It still felt like an earthquake when the giant fell, though. And even though he didn’t touch me, the sheer force of his impact was like a grenade. I was pounded down onto the floor. My nose smashed to one side. I could feel my cheek fracture. But I lived.

  I scrambled to my feet only to knock my head into the back of the giant’s upper leg, thumping into his leather armor. The giant smelled like dust, broken rocks, and a pig farm.

  Little lights kept popping all over in my eyesight, mixing with an occasional larger flare as my head tried to clear. I ran out from beneath the giant and was wondering where to hide, and wondering where Gerik was at, when I heard the giant make a very definitive sort of exhale. A grunt, with meaning.

  Before even turning, I could translate that grunt of his. I’d been spotted.

  I looked back.

  And met eyes with the giant.

  With the lights of the fireplace dancing over his face, I could even see a reflection of me there in his glasses.

  I looked terribly small.

  The giant twisted with a sudden lurch and tried to flatten me with a slap against the floor. He’d probably would’ve done it, too, if it wasn’t for how some books shifted beneath him, spoiling his aim.

  He frowned, and then spotted the dagger he’d dropped during his fall. He reached for it. I knew I couldn’t let him have it, so I raced for the dagger myself, determined to pick it up first, getting almost two steps into the race before realizing I was a fucking idiot. The dagger was easily my own size. There was no way I could pick it up. What the hell had I been expecting to do?

  I turned and raced away from the terrible scraping noise I could hear behind me, the sound of the dagger dragging over the stone floor as the giant grabbed it up. A moment later I found myself leaping in the air, guided by instinct, and the blade passed beneath me with a rumbling whoosh that was nearly the last thing I ever heard.

  Landing with a stumbling stride, I chanced a look back just in time to see the giant’s balled fist on an incoming route. I dove to the side. Another whooshing rumble as it passed. I left a smear of blood along the floor as I rolled to a stop. My nose was a fountain.

  “Fuck off!” I yelled at the giant, feeling like one of those tiny dogs with their jeweled collars and angry attitudes, the Chihuahuas of the world, the ones that never reach any taller than your ankles but are still aching for a fight.

  “Human,” the giant said in disgust and dismissal. He picked up a book and began swatting down with it, seeking to end my life in a literary fashion.

  “Fuck fuck fuck,” I chanted, staring at my oncoming death. But, just before the giant struck, an arrow sped into his ear. He gasped in pain and dropped the book, a leather tome the size of my couch crashing to the floor next to me, catching me with a glancing blow that slapped me down onto my back.

  Then, out of the corner of my eye, a flash of speed and a glimpse of naked skin as someone leapt over the book, raced up a toppled pile of other books before reaching the summit of the bookcase, and launched themselves across the void to land atop the giant’s head.

  It was Molly.

  “Fucking COMBAT!” she yelled. “Hell YEAH!”

  She brought her axe down on the giant’s skull. It bit deep. His entire body quaked, forcing Molly to hurriedly grab a lock of his hair to avoid falling.

  Then, with one foot on the giant’s shoulder and another kicking his nose, she chopped his glasses in half, swinging her axe into the bridge of the giant’s nose. The blade bit so deep that it became wedged.

  The giant batted her away with his hand. Molly was flung through the air and looked destined for a painful landing before a huge plant sprouted beneath her, growing in the blink of an eye.

  It was a strange plant with bamboo-like tentacles that caught the scantily-clad barbarian in mid-air, and which then rolled her to one side to avoid the giant’s dagger as it came stabbing down.

  The blade bit into the plant, cleaving the center in half and then clinking into the stone floor, the blade skritching to one side as the giant lost his grip with the impact and slid his hand down along the blade, losing a finger in the process.

  “Well fuck!” he yelled, and in his eyes I saw indecision for the first time. He realized he might lose this fight.

  “Shit!” he roared, standing up to his full height, which froze me for another moment. It was too obscene. This giant. An abomination. His very presence was chilling.

  I sped through the maze-like piles of books to try for a defensible position beneath the table, but was once again caught out in the open. The giant spotted me, and although he’d clearly decided to abandon the battle, he saw a chance to do a little more damage before leaving the room. He raised a foot that was as large as me and was about to stomp down, but then Molly yelled, “Hells Axe! Flare!”

  The axe, still wedged between the giant’s eyes, burst into heavy flames with an explosive puff that charred his surrounding flesh. The giant let out a wail of agony and again fell backward, crashing to the floor with another resounding impact that toppled a coffee cup from the table. It smashed to the floor next to me, nearly braining me, because even that damn cup was the size of a garbage can. It spilled tepid coffee in a drenching wave.

  Molly made a gesture and her axe pulled free from the giant and sped through the air to her hands. She caught it in mid-stride, running for both it and the giant at full speed, and before the monster could right himself on the floor and recover from the flames around his eyes, Molly brought her axe down on the back of his neck, chopping into the bone and then pulling it free to chop once more, this time on the front of his neck, severing his jugular and creating a spray of blood so powerful that it was like a fire hydrant.

  Molly was caught in the spray and flung backward like rioters being hit by a police hose, except in this case she was laughing fiercely, thumping along the floor until she was finally sprawled on her back in what amounted to a steadily growing pond of blood.

  “Fuck!” she yelled. “That’s better than sex!”

  I stumbled out from underneath the table, one hand on a chair leg for support, heaving in shock, watching a veritable stream of blood still pumping from the dead giant’s neck, and then I gasped as it suddenly felt like my left ear had been caught in a vice. The air wavered next to me and then Fridu of Stone Wood appeared, my ear pinched between her fingers.

  “I thought we told you never to go into a dungeon with Gerik,” she said in scolding tones. “I thought that was something you promised?”

  She tightened her grip.

  Molly, meanwhile, was happily splashing in the puddle.