One of the partitions of my consciousness drifted away from my own escape and focused onto the location of Elyonari and Griselda. I only had one thing to summarize about the giant.
It was enormous.
He stood well over eighty meters tall. His silhouette alone dominated the horizon while his enormous axe gleamed faintly beneath the pale moonlight.
Elyonari stood before him without the slightest hesitation. She had already activated her Divine Transformation.
Her body had expanded until she matched his height. Even at that size she retained the elegance that always surrounded her presence. She raised her now massive bow toward the giant.
Eighty-meter titans were standing on the sky castle. The truly ridiculous part was how fast they moved.
Most people imagine giant battles as slow, lumbering exchanges between massive figures who take minutes to complete a single movement. That was not what I was seeing. They moved even faster than us.
The giant swung his axe with such terrifying speed that the clouds were spread out instantly. Ely responded instantly, summoning an arrow on her bow.
The moment the arrow left the string, the entire sky castle shook.
A sonic boom slammed into the castle towers and scattering clouds in every direction. The giant barely reacted. His enormous hand axe flashed upward, intercepting the projectile with a deafening metallic clang that echoed across the floating structure. Fragments of shattered Nature Energy scattered through the air.
Fortunately, not every arrow was stopped. In her giant form, she could unleash seven arrows a second instead of thirteen.
Each release generated another thunderous shockwave so intense that the floating castle trembled beneath our feet even from a distance. Several of her arrows struck the giant directly, detonating against his torso with bursts of blinding light. Entire sections of cloud vaporized around the impact zones but the giant barely slowed down.
The wounds regenerated almost instantly.
Flesh and muscle reformed beneath the torn skin as though time itself had reversed around the injuries. His massive body kept rebuilding itself faster than most weapons could damage it.
Of course. Insane regeneration. Why wouldn't he have that too?
Despite the giant's size, the movement happened so quickly that several cloud banks were torn apart by the displaced air as he closed the distance between them. His axe came crashing down toward Elyonari in a vertical strike powerful enough to split the entire castle in half.
Elyonari's massive body twisted sideways, avoiding the strike by a margin so narrow that the wind pressure alone flattened the clouds beneath her feet. The axe slammed into the castle. Entire towers collapsed as the impact tore through the structure. From my position, it felt like a meteor strike.
Elyonari answered immediately with an arrow. This one struck the giant directly in the shoulder, blasting a crater into his flesh that briefly exposed bone beneath the impact zone. But then again, the wound began closing almost immediately.
Clouds had completely dispersed around them now. Their battle had literally blown the sky clear. The floating castle trembled continuously beneath the force of their movements as the two titans clashed. Their attacks kept sending shockwaves across kilometers of open air.
Eventually the giant closed the gap entirely.
The moment he reached her, Elyonari shifted her stance and stopped relying solely on her arrows. Her bow became a weapon in its own right.
She intercepted the incoming axe strike with the reinforced limbs of the bow. Instead of stepping back, she used the collision to redirect the giant's momentum, twisting the weapon aside while swinging the curved edge of the bow toward his arm. Even at that scale, the movement was precise.
Above them, another massive figure soared through the sky. Griselda, The Golden Goose, spread her enormous wings across the cloudless sky. The moment she opened her beak, a beam of radiant gold erupted downward.
The energy struck the giant squarely in the chest.
Instead of exploding, the light began solidifying around him, forming golden structures across his torso and limbs. The radiance wrapped around his arms and legs, slowing down his movements as the golden energy hardened into restrictive bindings. For the first time, his movements were actually hindered.
Griselda fired again. Another beam of golden light slammed into his body, expanding the bindings further as solid gold began creeping across his form, locking his joints and restricting his ability to swing the axe freely.
Through the telepathic network connecting all of us, Elyonari's voice suddenly appeared.
[Veneri! Proceed with Plan B!]
There was a brief pause before Veneri responded.
[Plan A failed?]
[Correct.]
Plan A had been simple. We let Elyonari fight him first to test his durability. If the giant's defenses were manageable, then the rest of us would join the battle and overwhelm him together. But, the regeneration alone had already proven that approach unrealistic.
Veneri's voice returned through the connection.
[Are you certain?]
Elyonari did not hesitate.
[Yes. If I kill him… I'll ascend.]
Veneri was silent for a moment.
[Alright.]
What happened next occurred so quickly that even my distributed consciousness struggled to process it. For a split second, the entire sky castle went completely still.
The floating fortress shattered from its center. Towers collapsed instantly. Massive stone structures disintegrated into fragments as the entire castle structure tore itself apart in a violent chain reaction. The sky castle simply ceased to exist.
For one brief moment I experienced the strange sensation of weightlessness as the floor disappeared beneath my feet.
Then gravity took over.
Stone debris, shattered towers and enormous chunks of the castle structure cascaded downward through the open sky. Even I was caught in the collapse. My body dropped through the air as the remains of the floating fortress crumbled around us.
Far above, the titanic silhouettes of Elyonari and the giant began plummeting toward the earth alongside the ruins of the sky castle.
The wind screamed in my ears as the shattered sky castle collapsed around us. For a brief moment there was nothing but the sensation of falling. Even so, my mind remained perfectly divided. I didn't withdraw my separated consciousness.
Plan B involved bringing the giant down. Throughout the entire time we were planning, Veneri had quietly been drawing Destruction Runes across the structure of the floating castle. He did it so subtly that even the giants who ruled the castle never noticed. All of this was constructed to give Elyonari the battlefield she needed because fighting a giant while the battlefield itself floated in the sky was a disadvantage for her.
Elyonari Mintheris is a Verdarite. Her dominion is nature itself. However, nature answered far more strongly when her feet touched land. Roots, soil, minerals, rivers, forests, those things amplified her power exponentially. The sky, however, gave her little to command beyond air currents and clouds. The floating castle had been a handicap so we removed it.
Below us the world expanded rapidly. Luciana and Jack were falling together through the rain of debris. Luciana raised one hand calmly despite the catastrophic descent and formed an enormous glowing Magic Circle beneath them. The circle rotated slowly to slow down their fall.
Another fragment of my consciousness focused on Veneri. He was falling as well but unlike the rest of us, he was not simply descending through empty air. He was fighting the entity that represented the giant's World Overwrite.
He still was not fighting seriously. He was holding back. The reason was painfully obvious.
If he unleashed his true destructive output right now, the shockwaves alone would obliterate every single one of us mid-air. Also, destroying the Overwrite would make the giant even more powerful since it would make him able to use even more energy on Elyonari.
So instead, he fought with frightening restraint. Even while restrained, the collisions between him and the Overwrite produced ripples in space that distorted the clouds around them.
My perception shifted again. Elyonari and the giant were falling too. Their fight had become even more violent. They were trading blows in midair.
The giant's body rotated as he swung a fist. His knuckles became coated in massive plates of stone, forming a brutal rocky gauntlet around his hand. Elyonari did not dodge.
She tanked it.
The force sent a shockwave outward that scattered clouds and debris for kilometers. Her massive transformed body bent slightly from the strike but she immediately retaliated. She kicked the giant directly in the chest. The giant's colossal body was hurled downward, accelerating his descent toward the earth far below.
Before he could recover Elyonari raised one arm. A massive emerald arrow formed instantly between her fingers. She drew the bowstring of her enormous weapon and released.
The arrow slammed directly into the giant's skull. A grotesque eruption of dark red blood burst outward across the sky like a foul storm cloud. The smell hit us almost immediately.
It smelled like a corpse that had been buried for centuries and then dredged from the depths of a swamp. Chunks of flesh and bone tumbled through the air with the debris of the destroyed castle.
Even so, Elyonari did not stop. She stretched both of her arms forward. A colossal beam of emerald fire emerged from her hands. The beam slammed directly into the giant's headless body and engulfed it completely.
The giant's body did not disintegrate but the force of the blast accelerated his fall dramatically.
I finally focused on my own descent. The ground was getting closer. Fields stretched beneath us but all of it was about to be destroyed.
Several glowing Flight Circles appeared behind me. They rotated rapidly and released bursts of force that slowed down my descent just enough to control my landing.
The moment I landed, the debris of the shattered castle slammed into the land at horrifying speeds. Entire towers crashed down like falling mountains. Stone bridges shattered into clouds of rubble. Massive gardens crashed into the farmland, crushing acres of crops instantly. Windmills snapped like fragile toys. Cracks tore through the fields as thousands of tons of stone smashed into the ground. All the characters in the fairytale screamed before they were horribly crushed by the debris.
For a few seconds the world looked like the aftermath of an apocalypse. That's when something moved inside the giant's corpse. Muscle fibers began knitting together. Before long, a new head began growing from the ruined neck.
Within seconds the giant's face had regenerated completely.
Through the telepathic network, Elyonari spoke calmly.
[Don't interfere. This is my fight. I'm close to the Fifth Enlightenment. I can feel the threshold already.]
Her massive form stepped forward across the devastated farmland as she faced the giant. The ground cracked beneath her weight.
[I will break through by killing him.]