There’s no time to gawk. The army is swarming around the titan. By the wall of conjured earth, the tired casters suffering from mana strain are put on the shoulders of knights and carried away from the area. I vaguely hear Zach yelling orders further ahead, accompanied by a parade of footsteps. The moment it’s safe, the army is moving. Something that’s required as shadows have already appeared in the sky. The doomhawks are circling. Only one or two but it won’t take long for more to appear.

Near the titan, Sir Plucky…oh, damn it. I suppose after that showing he deserves a little respect. The honorable Sir Polluck is by the titan’s side, being supported by another knight from his order, their white armor with yellow suns on their chests quite eye-catching.

He looks pale and his face is tight with either pain or stress, indicators that he’s also suffering from mana strain. Unsurprising. That must have been a monster of a spell. All I saw was a flash of light. I wonder if that was the spell he’s so famous for. According to Geneva, that could empty his core in seconds.

Kierra is crouched on the titan’s chest, a spot of stillness in a field of motion. Bell, check on Alana. I have to see what this elf is getting up to.

I sprint toward the enormous corpse before taking a running leap, grabbing fistfuls of fur to keep from sliding off as I scramble onto the titan’s chest. My nose twitches as I move toward my wife. Huh. This thing doesn’t stink. It doesn’t smell good but it doesn’t reek of animal musk like most wild creatures. Does it take baths? That would be even stranger than its magic breaching my assumed immunity. Monsters don’t bathe. Not unless they have a very good reason.

I push the thought out of my head as I drop a hand on Kierra’s shoulder. “We’re supposed to be moving.”

“This is an interesting creature,” she says, showing she has no intention of moving. “Its insides are burning. It goes beyond mere insulation. It has no choice but to live in this freezing cold. The sun would cook it.”

“Uh-huh. Very interesting but—"

“And its muscles. So much power and durability but little flexibility. That’s not the case for the secondary arms. I suppose they are the creature’s weakness when you cannot simply crack open its skull. They are much weaker but the fingers have extra joints. They are incredibly dexterous. Why would this brute need dexterous fingers, hm?”

“I don’t know, to make it easier to pull out the guts of its prey? We don’t have time to wonder about this.”

“Most interesting of all is its sexual organs—"

“Oh, come on!”

“It doesn’t have any.”

My indignation is pushed aside by overwhelming confusion. “What do you mean it doesn’t have—no, this can wait. The birds are circling.”

“I think we are lucky to have such eager dinner.”

“The goal is not to fight, I think.”

“You should eat this creature.”

“What? No.”

“We are past you keeping secrets, hm?”

“It’s not about my secrets.” Much. “They want to use this thing as bait for the birds while we make our escape. If I eat this titan, we endanger everyone else.”

She hums in displeasure. “I want to examine this creature in more depth. Something is not right. This creature is wrong, very wrong. I want to know why.” Her lips are pursed in a rare pout as she gets to her feet. “But the lives of the men must be prioritized.”

“You two!” I can’t see Alana but her voice reaches us. “We need to get moving.”

I grab Kierra’s arm and pull her with me, not giving her the chance to stall any longer. We leap off the corpse and land beside Alana, dressed in her armor with Bell hanging off her shoulder.

“Did you know the titan does not have genitals?” Kierra asks as we jog toward our army.

“Yeah,” Alana replies nonchalantly. “Some of them are like that. Most, really. Titan is a classification for a reason. We rarely, rarely see the same type of titan in a single campaign. They all seem to be different species. The only thing they have in common is their size.”

“Have none of the north investigated this strangeness?” Kierra asks.

“Please. We aren’t fools. Of course we’ve tried investigating. The problem is, it’s incredibly difficult. Field study is dangerous. Our people can only poke around a corpse for a few hours, at most, until other monsters smell a meal. Worse case, a bunch of different titans converge on the corpse and start fighting. Even if we did nothing but ran, we could still be annihilated. Under those conditions, it’s a little hard to do effective research.”

“But there are conclusions you can draw. If there is no avenue of reproduction, then those titans are made artificially. Maybe by these Lords of Winter?”

“It could just be that they have a method of reproduction that we can’t identify. But yeah, we’ve thought of the other option. Most of the orders consider the titans to be biological weapons. We think there are real ones and fake ones modeled after them. There are some with privates too.

“Whenever some fool starts talking about pausing the campaigns to preserve the lives of the north’s children or whatever nonsense the Order of Paradise Seekers starts spewing, the Bleak Moons hits them with the very horrible threat of a wave of titans left to grow until hundreds of them storm the fort. Always shuts them up.”

That is a horrible event to consider. A hundred of the monsters I just wrestled with is a catastrophe. Victory wouldn’t stand a chance, especially if they use crafty tactics. And if they move beyond Victory…ah. They can’t. Kierra said they’ll cook under the sun. That protects Harvest. Well, if all the titans are like that. Maybe that only applies to the artificial ones. Kierra described it as “wrong” which she wouldn’t attribute to a natural condition, no matter how strange.

We reach our army. There is no sign of exhaustion on the faces of the hunters and acolytes as they move through the snow at a brisk pace. They looked exhausted when we made camp last night but they’re certainly energized now. The titan must have put some life into them. They aren’t even sparing breaths to gossip about what they’ve seen, wholly occupied with escaping.

The skies are becoming more active as more of the ravenous birds take flight, the shadows passing over the titan rather than the army. Seeing the plan work, I feel better about abandoning such a large meal and strong form.

“Not an auspicious start but not a bad one,” Alana says beside me.

“What do you mean?”

“The campaign. We’re doing well. Two days in, our army has fifty or so hawks and a titan on our kill count.” She turns toward me. “Alongside what we can make from dismantling them, the monsters in the north have bounties. The hawks are a silver. The titans? Varies on size. Our friend back there is a hundred gold crowns, at least.”

“Saints.” No wonder the hunters and acolytes are here. That’s a lot of money for one kill. Also must be why Alana didn’t object to her brother volunteering one of our people for the plan.

“The knight who delivers the killing blow gets twenty percent of the bounty and the rest is split between the army. It’s the only way to make it rich in Victory, really.”

“It should also be a good start on largest kill,” Kierra adds.

To which Alana scoffs. “You think that was big? Please. You haven’t seen anything yet.”