"Son of a bitch!" Gabriel shouted as soon as he saw the giant form of the Armored Tyrant.

"That bastard scared the crap out of me!" He said to Liz, the lizard jumping on top of his shoulders. She, too, was much more interested in spectating the fight now.

The Tyrant tore through the assaulter, killing three of them in close sequence, the first one with a punch, the second one teleporting forward, breaking an azure film which enveloped the caped man and after grabbing him by the arms, emitting a beam of darkness from his mouth. The beam of darkness ravaged the body of the caped man through brute force. The third one was killed by the spikes, which enveloped the back of the armored giant. They exploded toward their target, curving and reaching it as if they were homing missiles.

The spikes had a thread made of black smoke connecting them to the armor, and once they had destroyed the body of their target, they were sucked back toward the Tyrant, taking their correct place on its back.

Even though Gabriel couldn't hear a thing, he knew that the monster in front of him was much bigger than the one he had escaped from.

If that was an Elite, he judged that the one in front of him was a Champion, which made his stats more than monstrous. And judging by the way he kicked the fourth assaulter, sending him shooting through the city, Gabriel thought that his team would have had zero chances of even taking a breath in its direction if they had met this kind of monster.

Ascertaining that they had no chances to survive the new resistance, the assaulter fled. As fast as they could, they shot through the sky to avoid the monster which could teleport but, luckily for them, not fly.

After their escape, the monster turned back, going to the throne room.

"Alright… I just need a moment…" Before following the Tyrant, Gabriel wretched some.

The fight and the subsequent gory kills had topped his horror milepost. However, he had nothing else in his stomach.

When he recovered, Gabriel passed through the spirit walls and the closed door.

He found the Tyrant observing a fur-woman. She had kowtowed to an altar and was there immobile, in prayer.

The beast shook awake from his reverie. It got closer, then bent forward, picking the woman up, which revealed to be dead. After looking at her for a few terrible moments of stillness, it turned toward the stairs and disappeared with a teleport.

Gabriel climbed up the stairs in a hurry, and after checking a few rooms, he soon found himself in their bedroom.

The Armored Tyrant was sitting by the bed where the woman lay dead.

Suddenly, Gabriel could notice a faint tremble in the walls. The attack had started anew. The Tyrant slowly got up, an unwavering look in his dark face-armor.

The pitch-black void it had in place of his eyes and mouth started emitting dense dark fumes in the air, and from them, a giant crown made of spikes soon solidified on his head.

Then a ripple of energy emanated, shattering every object in the room at once. The Tyrant teleported once again, the strength of it, tearing a hole in the bed and the pavement.

Gabriel and Liz shivered.

"Did he- just become even stronger or something?"

He heard the first of the explosions after that.m and hurried out of the building.

A fight of absurd proportion was taking place outside.

The caped figures had returned, and they had brought a casket with them, in which two of the figures were bringing upon the palace's roof.

Many others had followed the caped ones. The newcomers had a cape of a lighter shade, not that he would be able to say which color, given the fact that every spirit lacked a proper color, except for the Armored Tyrant, they were taking the guards and the rest of the populace at bay while the darker caped ones assaulted the monster/king from the air.

The fight was, of course, already a lost one. The Tyrant had become even stronger than before.

Emitting a beam of darkness from his mouth, roughly twenty times thicker and denser than before, he evaporated one of the caped assaulters in an instant.

The battle continued, getting more and more in favor of the defenders until, with another explosion, the Tyrant was sent barreling inside of the palace's garden, the earth shook. Something or someone manifested in midair.

What looked like a human appeared. His face was hidden by a white mask. He sat above an immense flying turtle. In his hands was a scepter that emitted a current in the form of visible electrical tension. It promised terrifying power.

Gabriel's gaze went once again toward the Tyrant. It was rising from the crater that had formed with its falling.

Even in that silent world where everything he could hear was his own breath. Gabriel saw the Tyrant howl at the new arrival, the air rippled with the inaudible noise, then it disappeared.

Coming crashing down against the turtle. A barrier defending the humongous turtle shattered with a crack. Simultaneously, shackles appeared around the monster, blocking his legs, arms, neck, and tail. The human pointed his scepter at the monster, unleashing a concentrated ray of lightning.

The Tyrant received the blow full-on, unable to teleport away. The thing went on for quite a few seconds until the shackle blocking the creature's neck broke. At this point, the armored monster unleashed his beam of darkness from the mouth.

The two powerful energies contended for another couple of long seconds until another explosion took place. The light from the explosion blinded Gabriel and Liz for a second.

When their sight returned, they witnessed once again the Tyrant, tirelessly launching attack after attack on the human and its turtle pet-mount. The battle didn't seem to reach any breaking point.

It was a few minutes of struggles after that, but it became soon clear that the attackers were once again having the upper hand.

The Tyrant grew more and more desperate. His energy started becoming unstable as the battle raged on. He did not seem to be able to gain an edge over the human. Then it really started becoming wild. The darkness from the monster grew and slowly unfolded over that part of the village. Gabriel had no idea what it was doing or if it had some sort of backlash, but it sure looked ominous.

Then something else happened, and everyone stopped. They all looked at the top of the castle; something Gabriel could not hear was going on up there. But he could see a faint light.

The Tyrant, as if in a trance, started acting mad.

He tried to reach the place, but his teleport's ability failed him, probably the shackles that still blocked his legs. He tried to jump to reach the tower, but the human with the turtle got in his way once again. It was then that he unleashed a new terrible ability.

Huge spikes, looking like mountain peaks, jutted out from the earth. They grew fast, faster than Gabriel's eyes could follow, and one of them successfully tore through the turtle's defenses, impaling it.

As the turtle rider was unsaddled, his focus changed. And he started going all out.

Attacks after attacks, he unleashed turned the sky bright.

Their power was so intense that Gabriel was dazzled. He had to battle with the constant menace of fainting. Anyway, he had no way anymore to follow what was happening. It was beyond him.

He started counting for the brighter explosions, it was getting closer to resetting, but he had a hunch.

With Built to Fly and Burst Attack combination, he launched himself up toward the tower.

The two dark caped men were enveloped in a barrier. But they were clearly corpses now. The casket was wide open, and it contained a dark sphere, which rotated and grew, and the more it grew, the more unstable it looked. Dark loops of energy flared forth, and even though he had never seen it, he understood what he was looking at.

"The singularity…"

And this one, he could clearly see.

After a few more seconds, the singularity's growth speed rose exponentially. Gabriel found himself within its expanded form, surrounded by darkness so thick that it blackened everything.

Gabriel let Built to Fly end, and once again, he could see, but only briefly, because after that, the singularity finally exploded, covering the world in white light.

And the memory reset itself.

***

Dustille and the group of escapees, to which four other parties had joined, were hiding in one of the Dungeon's exit tunnels. It was, of course, locked.

No matter how much they tried to pierce through it, the Mana was too thick to punch through.

Even Sigmund, with his new and extremely powerful Skill, barely put a dent in it. Yes, the rock shattered, and yes, they were able to see from the other side of it, even getting the attention of the guardian and a few more people, which were family members and some renowned Veteran and Experts of the Giants, but that was it. The Mana film covering the Dungeon had not been damaged in the slightest. And soon, the stratum of rock started regrowing, hiding the group from their families' view once more.

It had been almost ten hours since the start of the Dungeon upheaval, and the battle had started raging a few hours earlier.

The giantess had taken the role of outlook. Her many sensory Perks helped her correctly following the state of the war.

She stood on one of the mountain peaks, constantly using Far Sight to follow the war's state.

It was taking place in the lake. The Tyrants had taken the battle to the enemy territory. Turtle Island would become a much more dangerous place if they won the war, rivaling the Wyrm dungeon, maybe even more since the armored creatures were more coordinated than the wyrms and wyverns. They had almost a sentient level of intelligence.

The last time they had the dungeon role had been roughly three centuries prior and had held it for more than one hundred years. It was only the intervention of a coalition of armies formed by Giants and Fairies led by both their Champions, which made taking down the Tyrant King possible.

"Is she going to come?" Asked a voice behind her.

Dustille disengaged Far Sight and turned toward him. It was, of course, Terry.

The Crystal Viking had partied with her for more than thirty years. They knew each other like brother and sister.

"She will," Dustille said.

Terry reached and sat beside her.

"It'll never be the same."

"I know…" she answered.

"Do you think… I know it's soon, but do you think we should… join in our grief?" Terry asked.

"I was actually thinking the same," Dustille answered.

"Of course, you would be the official leader, even though the boy has the Perk."

"That goes without saying, though… I don't know, Marcle would probably hold it against me if something happened to his nephew… but… let's not go ahead of ourselves, they are both young, even Carla, she's barely a full-fledged giantess, even though she looks older. They need time to grieve."

"Yes, I think-"

A tremor shook the mountain. Dustille got up and turned her sight toward the feet of the mountain. The group was streaming out of it with urgency.

Soon another tremor, wilder than the previous, shook the mountain, and another one soon followed.

Dustille turned toward Terry.

"How do humans say? Speak of the devil?" She grinned.

***

Gaia was pale.

She was still recovering from the lock the Yggs had placed on her soul. If they had the ability to recede her connection with the Rapids of Mana, they would, but even that was too much for them; if that wasn't enough, the news of the Herald being trapped in a Dungeon war and her inability to go save him had her panic.

"What kind of daughter have you raised, mother? I can't even complete my life mission. I'm a failure."

The Waterfront girl was in a cell, suspended high up on Yggdrasil's upper crown, a special cell used to contain Yggs, not that they needed it very much. Yggs were perfect. They didn't as much as try to bend the rules.

Like ants, they respected and worshipped Yggdrasil and their Queen.

But the cell was more than enough to contain a Tier 6, and as much as she could rival one or even outright beat one, with the help of the Rapids of Mana. Alone she was just a Tier 4, a strong one, but definitely not enough to contend with a Tier 5, escaping from a cell built to contain something on the level of a Champion monster? Just a dream.

She sighed and sighed.

At this point, Clast and Yagais were racking their brains to find some way to help the Herald.

She knew that sending a Human Champion, her father, in this case, was out of the question. He could not leave the Cradle uncovered, not with the Priests threat looming on them.

Would the Giant's Champion make it in time?

She shook her head. All that she could do was spectate. She had had Crystal detach from her soul as soon as her judgment came, and she had directed him to follow the development and act upon them.

When a voice came from the Seer of Carnage, which a few hours earlier in the day had managed to locate the Herald, Crystal had departed at full speed toward Kanceldom. The wolf would clearly not be as fast as Yagais, but this way, she would have a way to speak to the Herald directly and ask for forgiveness for the way she and the others had treated him before Yagais or, god forbid, Clast had any way to talk with him.

So she prayed, Gaia prayed for the Giant's Champion to go to his rescue and for Crystal to make it in time.

***

"I can't believe you ate the whole thing…" Fred, the huge man, said, shaking his head. He was still full to the brim and felt like his belly was about to burst.

The group had long since left the inn where they had dined, and after hearing words of the Giant's Champion joining Kanceldom in the effort to burst through the Dungeon's walls, they knew they could not let the chance go.

"Told you," Darte answered shrugging.

The party, plus Darte, waited near the dungeon entrance, where the Champion had decided to breach. Once again, Nastia's solid illusions, in the form of a giant bird, sustained them in the sky.

When the Champion started thundering her huge club imbued with a massive amount of Diamond element power against the pure Mana walls, the air displacement of the blows made them all shake, even the other veterans and experts gathered, giants or not, and other inhabitants of Kanceldom, couldn't help but be shaken by the indirect impacts.

"She's been at it for a few minutes now," Greta whispered to them, "we sure she's gonna make it?"

"Yes," it was Sato, the Asian owl-man, always in merged form, "she needs to deplete the store Mana before she can effectively burst through. It would be a waste to use her strongest Skills, not to say dangerous given the number of people that gathered here," Sato said, turning around and signaling around them with his big, half-wing, half-arm appendages.

"She's really a beauty…" Fred said, "If only I was ten, eleven feet taller…"

"Keep dreaming, big guy. Even if you were, she'd be way out of your league," Greta said, puffing.

"Alright, don't act all jealous now. You know you can have it whenever you want," Fred said to her with a smirk.

"See? You really are a dreamer," she answered.

Prisha giggled.

"Focus." Said Nastia.

Darte sighed. She just can't relax… Was it the Sheer, Clast, or her envy that fucked her up so badly? He shook his head.

Yet he couldn't help but admit that she was right because, after a couple of hits, the Giants' Champion started using her Skills. She transformed her body into what looked like Diamond, and her strength multiplied.

Charging an attack, she paused for a couple of seconds. They were so intense that they could be exchanged for twenty seconds. Darte could feel the overwhelming amount of power she was gathering. If he had chosen Analyze and sported the right level, he guessed he would be able to see her Power reaching the four digits right then and there.

When she finally released, it felt like a baseball bat man move.

Darte could not follow the movement, but he could feel the outcome.

The walls made of pure Mana shattered like crystal before decaying in Mana dust, and right away, with a beautiful call, she signaled them all to rush inside after accepting the Raid invite.

Graskielle Allgood-Hemmingbaum, Champion of the Giants, has invited you as Third division leader. Would you like to accept?

So she does have good eyes. Darte smiled, accepting the invite.