The voice was a shriek—angry, feminine, but with a terrestrial, almost shrill quality that was a bizarre relief after the cosmic thunder of the gods. It wasn't divine. Just... loud. And very, very close.
Pete's eyes shot open, the world swimming into focus just in time to see a massive, sandaled foot descending upon him—
CRACK!
It wasn't an kick. It was a cataclysm. A three-foot-long slab of leather-wrapped flesh connected with his midsection with the force of a car clash. His newly acquired, solid, physical body carved in.
His stomach compressed into a pancake, his ribs flexed inward with a groan of protesting bone, and his spine arched into a shape it was never meant to achieve. The air, that precious, wonderful air he'd only just rediscovered, was violently expelled from his lungs in a single, silent, agonized wheeze.
And then, in defiance of all momentum and sense, he was flying.
The world became a spining, nauseating vortex of color and sound. The impossible azul sky, the coarse yellow sand, a sea of giant, cheering faces, the weathered stone of a distant wall—all a kaleidoscopic blur as his body cartwheeled through the air like a discarded toy.
The pain was exquisite. It was a symphony of agony, a stinging, burning, all-consuming fire that started in his ruined gut and radiated outward through every nerve, every muscle, every newly-remembered fiber of his being.
It was a pain of being alive, and it was horrific.
"AHHHHHHH!"
He was a pinwheel of suffering, flailing end over end, completely and utterly at the mercy of physics, until—
CRACK!
He hit something that was definitely not sand. Stone. A wall.
The impact was a fresh_wave of pure torment, driving phantom air from his already empty lungs and sending starbursts of light exploding behind his eyes. His back, his shoulders, the back of his skull_all of them screamed in protest.
And the crowd roared.
WTF!!!
The sound hit him like a physical force, a solid wall of noise. Tens of thousands of voices—no, hundreds of thousands—screaming, cheering, baying for blood with the ecstatic glee of pack of starving wolves that had just been tossed a steak.
Pete slid down the wall in a scraped, graceless heap and landed on the ground with a wet, sickening thud. His body—this precious, breakable, wonderful body he'd just gotten back—felt like a bag of broken glass. Everything hurt. Everything.
"Ugh... fuck me..."
He forced his eyes open, his vision swimming, and stared.
The structure stretched before him—a colosseum so impossibly vast it defied sanity. It made the one in Rome look like a cheap, crumbling sandbox toy.
The arena alone had to be half a mile across, the pale sand a patchwork of shades stained with old, dried blood and slick with new, fresh offerings. The walls weren't walls; they were mountains of granite and marble that rose in tiered, impossible levels that seemed to go up forever, each one packed with people.
Giants. All of them. Easily nine to twelve feet tall, dressed in flowing robes and elaborately tooled armor that gleamed in the sunlight.
But it wasn't primitive. It wasn't the brutal, sweaty barbarism he'd expected.
It was beautiful. Horrifyingly, stunningly beautiful giantesses too.
The architecture was classical perfection elevated to divinity.
Monolithic marble columns, white as bone, were inlaid with veins of glittering gold. Silk banners, each one a masterpiece of craftsmanship, rippled in an unseen breeze, displaying insignia he didn't recognize. Elegant fountains, carved from a single piece of obsidian, sprayed arcs of crystalline water into the stands.
The giants wore togas and chitons, yes, but they were woven from fabrics that shimmered and shifted, seeming to capture and refract the light itself. Their jewelry—necklaces, bracers, tiaras—looked like it was forged from captured stars, and on their heads they wore crowns of impossibly vibrant flowers and precious metals.
They weren't just a mob. They were an audience. Patrons. A civilization of elegant, opulent, bloodthirsty giants. And they were applauding his introduction.
It was fantastical. Clean. Civilized in a way that made Earth's ancient world look like a rough, crude draft.
But on their the faces—
The faces were twisted in manic grins belying thier beautiful faces. Hungry. Feral. They were the front row of an apocalypse, and the main event was about to begin. They were here for blood. They'd paid for blood. And the sight of Pete's limp body slamming into the wall like a discarded doll was the most satisfying thing they had seen all week.
"KILL HIM!"
"RIP HIM APART!"
"MAKE IT LAST!"
Yeah, definitely barbaric. No Joke!
The screams were a physical thing, a hot wind carrying the scent of their bloodlust.
In the center of the arena, the giant who had kicked him raised her arms in triumph—a gesture of ownership. Pete's vision swam back into focus, and with a jolt of sheer, unadulterated shock, he realized they were her arms. The gladiator was a woman. A giantess, twelve feet tall and built like a warrior goddess sculpted from granite and rage.
Her muscles, corded and thick, seemed to have their own pulse. Her face, contorted in a grin of brutal victory, was a mask of pure pleasure.
She bellowed at the crowd, a sound that vibrated in Pete's broken ribs, and the sea of giants screamed back their adoration.
Her weapon was a thing of nightmares: two massive iron spheres, each the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, connected by a chain as thick as his thigh. A meteor hammer. She began to spin it over her head, the chain whistling a deadly tune through the air, the iron balls blurring, leaving troughs of displaced sand in their wake.
Pete forced himself to sit up, every single movement a fresh masterpiece of exquisite agony. A wet, ragged sound escaped his lips. "What... where..."
And then it all came crashing down on him, not as a memory, but as a brutal data dump. The book. That cursed, beautiful, infuriatingly blank book. Eighty thousand dollars for eighty thousand pages of absolutely nothing. The anger, the idiotic plan to drive down there and teach that smug dealer a lesson.
The drive. The sun on the windshield, a blinding glare of malicious light. The metal screaming. The tree, coming for him at a million miles an hour.
The Underworld. The fall. The guards. The chasm. Her.
Persephone. Naked and perfect and utterly, murderously furious. Her promise, a brand seared onto his soul: "I WILL FIND YOU ACROSS ETERNITY ITSELF!" Hades's vow, a geological certainty: "I. WILL. FIND. YOU."
He had gazed upon a goddess in her naked form. He had stared. He had desired her. What else could he possibly expect but a front-row seat to his own divine retribution?
But he'd escaped. Somehow, against all logic and reason, he'd escaped from the iciest pit of Hell itself.
And now—
Now he was here. In a colosseum. In a new body. With a giantess gladiator about to turn his skull into a Jackson Pollock painting with two boulders on a chain.
A strange, hysterical laugh bubbled up in his chest, but it just came out as a pained gurgle. "The heavens must be laughing their asses off," he muttered to himself.
***
A/N: Are you guys even ready for this!