Gareth's scream as he was dragged into the layer was quite... lasting. The rest of the party didn't hesitate to follow, bolting through the roughly human sized hole made by the giant hand. Aris was the last one to go through, and the moment he did, he couldn't help but do a double take on what he was seeing.
He took a fleeting moment to study the boss of this dungeon as the rest of the party moved to free their leader from its grasp.
The boss wasn't exactly a monster, no. It vaguely resembled a humanoid shape, long limbs that stretched out from its body, a perfectly proportionate head, and alabaster skin that almost, almost looked real at a glance. Most terrifying of it all was its face, mostly featureless, no nose, a mouth sealed shut—except for eyes that are far too many and far too chaotic.
The thing, whatever it was, towered over even the already giant Gareth. From what Aris could deduce, at minimum, it stood at over ten meters tall.
....which was quite the problem.
Why?
Aris let out a slow groan when he saw the scene in front of him, a faint expression of annoyance blooming on his face.
Dealing with one of these giants would have already been hard enough.
There was another one.
And the other one, was chasing after the rest of his party who weren't already occupied from assisting Gareth. Terrified screams filled the chamber as the men and women dodged for their lives, desperately trying to distance themselves from the giant that was grabbing at them.
The sounds of explosions filled the chamber as the mages freed Gareth from the monster, the rest of the party reorganizing into something that generously resembled a formation.
Aris stood where he was and did a quiet assessment.
Two of them. The first had Gareth, who was now free and already swinging with the particular furious energy of a man whose pride had been wounded. The second was occupied with the rest of the party, who were managing to stay alive through a combination of genuine skill, referring to the one person with brains, and the statistical improbability of panic sometimes producing correct movement.
Nobody was dead yet. That was the most positive thing he could say about the situation.
The second giant's hand came down in a sweeping arc that scattered three party members like loose change. They hit the ground rolling, armour cracking, one of them not getting back up immediately.
Then thing turned its head—that awful, featureless head, the too-many eyes catching the light of the chamber in a way that the human visual system quietly rejected, and found a new target.
It found Aris.
Fair, he supposed, he was the only one standing still.
The giant regarded him for a heartbeat with its collection of eyes, the way something regarded a thing it hadn't categorised yet. Then it moved. Long limbs folding and extending in a gait that covered distance in a way that shouldn't have worked mechanically but did, crossing the chamber toward him with a sound like something tearing, the sonic boom knocking the out the rest of the party it hadn't already demobilised.
Aris exhaled.
He unclenched the tension inside him.
Not much, he was never reckless about how much, not here, not with seven other people in the room and stone walls that would start developing structural opinions if he wasn't precise. Just enough. A controlled bleed, a single thread of his power let loose like a needle rather than a blade, directed not at the creature itself but at the space around it.
The air immediately surrounding the giant simply stopped cooperating.
Its momentum didn't disappear, momentum was energy, and he wasn't wasting this on energy, not yet. But the coordination required to sustain it began, quietly, to fail. The precise sequencing of signals from whatever passed for a nervous system in something like this. The microsecond timing between intention and motion. The complex machinery of something that had been built by dungeon logic to be functional and efficient.
Dungeon logic, Aris had found, was not especially resilient to disorder.
The giant's next step landed wrong. Not dramatically—it didn't collapse, didn't stumble, didn't do anything that would have been legible from a distance as a mistake. It simply failed to be exactly where it intended to be, by a margin of inches that meant its reaching hand passed over his head rather than closing around it.
He stepped to the side with the same unhurried quality as a person moving around a chair.
The giant recalibrated immediately, of course it did. It turned, then reached again.
Aris was already somewhere else.
This was the part that took patience. Not the power itself, which was easy, but the management of it, keeping the thread narrow and directed while the rest of him held everything else sealed so tight it pressed against the inside of his ribs like a second heartbeat. The ache was familiar. He'd had it so long it had stopped feeling like pain and more like an extra part of his existence.
From across the chamber, he could hear Gareth's battle still underway, the crash of a great sword, a roar, something shattering. Good. Gareth was capable. Gareth would be fine.
The giant in front of him reached for him a third time.
Aris looked at it, at the long arm extended toward him, at the alabaster hand that was large enough to close around two of him, and let the thread sharpen by a single degree.
The arm stopped.
Not retracted, stopped. Mid-extension, the complex chain of structural integrity maintaining that elongated limb simply ceased to be interested in its job. A fracture line developed at the elbow, nearly invisible, the kind of damage that accumulated somewhere below the threshold of notice.
Then the giant tried to apply force through a compromised joint.
The resulting sound was considerable.
The creature itself made no noise, it had no mouth for that—but it recoiled, and in recoiling it staggered, and in staggering the too-many eyes all shifted toward its own arm with an expression that, on a featureless face, Aris could only read as a first encounter with consequences.
He heard boots on stone behind him.
"What," said Silas, the third most competent awakened in this party, arriving with the out-of-breath energy of someone who had run across a dungeon chamber and was revising their understanding of what they'd run toward, "is happening."
"There are two of them," Aris said.
"I can see that." A pause. "Why is it holding its own arm."
"Probably pulled a muscle."
Another pause. Aris could feel Silas looking at him. He didn't turn around.
"Did you," Silas said slowly, "do something to it."
"I'm standing here."
"That's not an answer."
The giant, apparently deciding that whatever was wrong with its arm was less important than the two small humans in front of it, abandoned subtlety and simply swung the intact arm like a club, the kind of horizontal sweep designed to solve a wide variety of problems at once.
Silas hit the ground immediately, which was correct.
Aris ducked slightly, which was... sufficient.
The arm passed overhead with a displacement of air that rearranged his hair in a way that was going to be irritating later.
"Okay," Silas said, from the floor, "we should probably-"
"I'll handle this one." Aris straightened up, fixing his collar on reflex. "Check on the ones who went down on the east side, make sure they don't get caught in the crossfire."
Silas looked at him. Then at the ten-meter giant. Then back at him.
"By yourself?"
"I'll be quick."
"Aris—"
"Just go."
Another pause. This one had a different quality to it, the pause of someone running a calculation and arriving at an answer they found deeply inconvenient.
"Fine," Silas said, in the tone of a man filing something away for later. He pushed himself up and moved, quickly, toward the downed party members on the east side.
Aris waited until he was clear.
He didn't exactly dislike Silas like he did for the rest of the party. This man was clearly a capable, considering that just in a year after awakening he had managed to climb up to this level. Without an aspect at that.
Maybe he would try to stay in touch with this one.
Then he looked back up at the giant, at its too-many eyes and its sealed mouth and its damaged arm and its fundamental nature as a thing built by dungeon logic to be formidable, wondering what he would try out for dinner with the pay from today.