When they were done with the wolves, they were interrupted by a far more dire threat. A pair of giants who looked strong enough to topple with a single blow the crates they’d piled up at the ruined gates stumbled out of the trees. Their crimson skin and pitch-black eyes stood in sharp contrast to the greenery around them.

Fortunately, Florian had just enough juice left in him to create two giant spears of ice. They formed in the air first as long rods of water, which then chilled rapidly into the glorified icicles he’d become all too familiar with. The entire process took less than ten seconds, and with a thought that made his head ache, he sent them spinning at the giants’ eyes.

One of the icicles caught a giant unaware, the conjured weapon penetrating deep into its skull. It died on the spot. The other giant, however, seemed to have greater reflexes than its compatriot. It swiped the spear to the side with its free hand. When the danger had safely crashed into the grass nearby, the giant turned to Florian, roaring and raising its tree-club high into the air.

It seemed that all bets were off, and Florian had nothing left up his sleeve. “Guys, I’m out of magic!” he cried, retreating backwards as fast as he dared without breaking eye contact with the mountain that walked on two legs.

Jacquelyn bit back a curse. “Help me!” she shouted, and instantly the traders jumped into motion. Florian looked around with surprise; it seemed that they had a card that they hadn’t told him about. It was a flurry of action, crates being rearranged until they found whatever they were looking for. Using whatever tools they had on hand, they busted the crate open. Raising his eyebrows, Florian watched found as Jacquelyn heaved an honest-to-goodness RPG onto her shoulder.

Taking a knee, Jacquelyn took aim at the giant. By now, it was dangerously close, and Florian wasn’t even confident that they would be safe from the explosion that the RPG would cause. But he supposed that Jacquelyn knew more about it than he did, and so he trusted her when she sent the rocket on its way.

The rocket impacted the giant, and the grenade exploded violently. They were sent stumbling backwards from the forces, but ultimately no worse for wear. The same could not be said of the giant, whose face looked like it had seen the business end of a cheese grater. It had dropped its weapon on the ground, and the club looked like it had caught fire in a few places. But the giant, despite all of its injuries, remained standing.

After a moment or two, it slowly heaved its massive club up from the ground, the growing fire slowly crawling up the giant’s arms as the entire log caught fire. With a shaky first step, and a more sturdy second, the giant was upon them.

When the club came crashing down, Florian scrambled backwards, feeling wind rush in front of him. As he tried to step further back, he found himself back-to-back with one of the pickups. He was stuck. The giant tried making some kind of expression, though its burnt-off face made understanding it next to impossible. If he had to guess, the creature was probably gloating.

Bullets ripped through the air, but they were evaporated upon contact with the thing’s skin. It seemed that the only possible place to hurt them was their eyes or, as in the exceedingly rare circumstances that one had an RPG, with explosives. Nonetheless, the giant seemed pretty ticked off by the traders’ attacks, growling but not turning away from Florian. It raised its flaming club again, looking like an avatar of fire.

“Fuck,” Florian breathed, mustering whatever mental stamina he had and drawing on the fumes of Control he had left. His head pounded something fierce, but Bludgeon glowed a slight blue. That would have to be enough.

Florian struck the giant’s knee, delivering the strongest overhead strike that he could manage with his time running out. He could feel Bludgeon meet initial resistance, much like magnets would repulse each other. But that moment soon faded, and Bludgeon slammed into the giant with the trained force a former blacksmith could muster.

It toppled the giant, bringing the creature down to the earth along with its flaming tree. Roaring, it grabbed at Florian, its hand closing around the entirety of the wooden part of his left leg. It tugged on him, tripping him and bringing him down to the ground as well. Florian felt the heat of the giant and the flames that ran all along its body, and it felt no cooler than the forge he worked in. He fought his panic as the flames caught on his leg. There was precious little time before it would run up his clothes and body, too.

He heard a rifle’s crack, and a bullet struck the giant dead in the eye. The giant died with a whimper, and in its death, released its grip on Florian. Pulling himself away from the giant’s corpse, Florian quickly brought Bludgeon down on his wooden leg, shattering it and separating the flaming piece from the stump that remained attached to him.

He breathed a sigh of relief, looking up to see his savior. One of the older traders, a man with gray hair and a perpetual scowl, stood over him, inspecting the creature. “Back in my day, we’d shoot at squirrels, you know,” he said before walking away and leaving Florian to bask in his survival.

“Finish up those fortifications, now! We need to fix what those giants broke, and we need to do it before the sun goes down,” Jacquelyn pressed her tired subordinates, but they complied without a complaint. She approached him, scanned him with her eyes, made some kind of snap decision before walking away.

Florian was too tired to be curious about it, and he just lay there in the grass, nursing the mother of all headaches and dreading the repairs he’d have to make to his leg just to be able to walk normally again. Tomorrow – if the Hellwolves didn’t overrun them at night – would be a pretty terrible day. He groaned, drawing the ire of a nearby trader, who just so happened to be carrying a crate that looked like it might have weighed a hundred pounds, judging by the man’s furiously red face.

Florian kept his frustration to himself for the rest of the afternoon, and he was fairly sure he even managed to snag a nap, because when the sun fell, he couldn’t remember exactly how he’d made it into the keep, nor could he remember why Jacquelyn occupied one of the chairs in the room.

“We need to talk.”

Florian winced. Nothing good ever came out of that phrase.