She swung.
No warning. No taunt. Just a vicious, horizontal strike aimed at Pete's midsection, both iron balls converging to simply pulp his torso.
Pete didn't blink—couldn't. He was at his limit. One more teleport and he felt he would just... unravel.
So he did the only thing he could.
He brought the massive sword up in a desperate, clumsy, graceless parry.
His form was abysmal—all wrong, no technique, just raw, panicked desperation. He held the blade with both hands, arms fully extended, bracing it like a shield.
CLANG!
The impact was catastrophic.
The sound was like a cathedral bell being struck by a freight train—a deafening, teeth-shattering crack that rippled through the air in a visible shockwave.
The force nearly tore Pete's arms from their sockets. His shoulders dislocated partially—the popping sound lost in the din. His elbows hyperextended. His wrists bent backward at obscene angles.
His feet left the ground.
His body was driven backward a full three feet, plowing twin furrows in the sand with his heels before he collapsed.
He hit the ground on his knees, the sword trembling violently in his grip, his arms hanging limp and useless, numb from fingertips to shoulders.
But he'd blocked it.
The iron ball had bounced off the blade, deflected just enough, thrown slightly off its murderous course. It hadn't pulverized him. Hadn't turned his torso into chunky salsa.
The crowd went completely, utterly, apoplectically insane.
"HE BLOCKED IT!"
"THE MORTAL BLOCKED A GIANT'S STRIKE!"
"IMPOSSIBLE!"
"MORE! MORE! MORE!"
Their excitement was a sonic weapon, a roar that made the stone seats vibrate, that made Pete's ribs ache in time with the stomping of a hundred thousand feet.
The giantess snarled—actually snarled, like a cornered wolf. Her face twisted with disbelief and a mounting, incandescent rage. She yanked the hammer back for another strike, muscles bulging, veins standing out like thick, writhing ropes beneath her skin.
Pete knew he couldn't block again. His arms were destroyed—completely. Another impact like that and they would literally separate from his body.
So he did the only thing left.
He attacked.
Pete lunged forward, a one-legged, bleeding raccoon with a stolen car part. The sword scraped through the sand, leaving a deep furrow, far too heavy to lift. But he used the last of his momentum, let gravity do the work, and swung the blade in a low, ugly arc that had no technique, no finesse, nothing but a final, convulsive heave of desperate strength.
The blade connected with the giantess's shin.
Crunch.
The sound was wet and horrible—the ugly tearing of meat and tendon, the gristly protest of a bone resisting and then partially giving way. The sword bit deep—not through the bone, her bones were too thick, too strong—but it hewed through the thick cordage of muscle and connective tissue. It chewed into the meat of her calf.
Blood erupted in a dark, systolic fountain, spraying across Pete's face, hot and coppery and smelling of iron. It splattered across the sand in thick, immediate gouts, pooling around his feet.
The giantess screamed.
But it wasn't a scream of pain.
It was a scream of pure, incandescent, apoplectic rage.
Her eyes went wide, the pupils dilating into black pools that swallowed the blue-green of her irises entirely.
A deep, furious flush crept up her neck and flooded her face, making veins stand out on her forehead and throat like thick, writhing worms.
A fleck of white foam appeared at the corner of her mouth as her lips peeled back in a rictus of pure, unadulterated animal fury, showing every single one of her tombstone teeth.
The gaping wound on her leg didn't slow her. It didn't even seem to register as pain. If anything, it was a catalyst, the spark that lit a fuse in her brain, incinerating rational thought and replacing it with pure, psychotic, blood-lust.
"YOU DARE?!" she shrieked, her voice a hoarse, ragged thing tearing from her throat. "YOU DARE WOUND ME?! ME?!"
She went completely, utterly berserk.
The meteor hammer became a whirlwind of indiscriminate death. There was no pattern, no strategy, no thought—just raw, violent, chaotic fury given physical form. She swung wildly, both spiked balls carving through the air in unpredictable, overlapping arcs that promised only annihilation.
The chain screamed, the spikes whistled a deadly tune of pure chaos.
Left, right, overhead, even a clumsy underhand sweep—strikes came from every conceivable angle with no rhythm, no telegraph, no mercy. It was pure, unadulterated mayhem.
Pete backpedaled frantically, his wounded leg dragging behind him like a dead weight, leaving a smeared, crimson trail in the sand. Every desperate hop sent a fresh bolt of white-hot agony through his calf.
One blur of spiked iron came at his head—he threw himself into a desperate duck, feeling the spikes pass just over his scalp, close enough to shear away a lock of his hair.
The other sang toward his ribs—he twisted with a strangled cry, the jagged teeth missing him by inches, one catching and tearing away a long strip of his tunic.
Both came together, a murderous pincer movement designed to pulp him between them—
BLINK.
His body moved on pure instinct, the last gasp of a drowning man. Reality twisted, and the sensation was now pure agony, like being dissolved in acid and crudely stapled back together. His consciousness flickered, threatening to blink out for good.
He reappeared five feet back, stumbling, his vision graying at the edges. The blood loss. The exhaustion. The massive system shock.
Can't keep doing this. Can't. Gonna die. Gonna—
The giantess charged, abandoning all pretense of combat. It was just a full-tilt sprint, a bellowing, wordless scream of pure rage, the hammer spinning overhead in a deadly figure-eight pattern that would shred him, scatter him, and turn the sand beneath him to glass.
Thirty feet away. A mountain of fury.
Twenty. The ground shook with her footfalls.
Ten. He could smell her blood, mixed with his own.
And something inside Pete finally broke. Or maybe, something finally clicked.
Maybe it was the adrenaline hitting a critical, toxic mass. Maybe it was the powers fully slithering awake in his system. Maybe it was just that tiny, stubborn reptile part of his brain that refused, under any circumstances, to simply lie down and die.
But when she swung—when she brought that hammer down in a final, devastating overhead strike that would crater the ground and turn him into an abstract painting of red—
Pete didn't just dodge.
He flowed.
The hammer came down like a meteor, both balls fused into a single, spiked meteorite of death aimed at the very spot he stood.
Pete threw himself forward—not back, not away, but into the teeth of the beast—and slid.
His body hit the sand and didn't stop. But it wasn't a clumsy, human slide. His spine bent—curving backward in a way that should have snapped every vertebra in his column. His hips twisted at a nauseating ninety-degree angle from his shoulders. His legs splayed in an impossible, boneless split.
His head tilted all the way back until his hair dragged in the sand.
He moved like water. Like a poured thing. Like a creature that had neve known the constraint of bornes.
He slid directly under a giantess, between her planted, tree-trunk legs. The hammer missed him by inches, the spikes tearing through his hair, the violent hot wind of its passage rolling over him like an explosion.
And as his body cleared the kill zone, as he passed fully beneath her—
BLINK.
The golden letters seared across his vision, brighter and faster than before. The command bypassed his conscious brain, an executive order delivered straight to the squirming, new-made circuits that ruled these powers.
Pete didn't appear on the other side of her.
He appeared on top of her.
On her shoulders.
Twelve feet in the air.
"What the—?!"
His hands shot out instinctively, a desperate, flailing grasp to stop his sudden, terrifying fall. His fingers closed around the only solid things within reach—
Her breasts.