Captain would know what to do.
Shaun Aki stood on top of the north wall of the capital with the wind in his face and watched the giant come, and that was the only thought in his head for three whole seconds.
Captain would know what to do. Captain isn't here.
So I'm the captain.
It was as tall as the cathedral and built all wrong, like a man someone had pieced together from memory in the dark. Grey-black hide stretched over bones that pushed out at the joints. Arms that hung past its knees. Moss and roots trailing from its shoulders, as if it had been lying under a hillside for a very long time and only just got up. Its face was a smooth dome with a single crack running down the middle, like a bell that had been dropped.
Every step it took, the wall shook under his boots.
Shaun knew the rule. Every hunter learned it in their first month, usually from someone who'd broken it and lived. A monster's rank is a warning, not a match. One hunter of the same rank can't take it alone. You want a party, and you want that party a rank higher.
That thing was B-rank at the very least.
He was one B-rank. Behind him on the wall were a handful of C's and a lot of D's and E's, the standby teams, most of them younger than he'd been on Gate Day.
A party of A's. That's what this needs. Captain, and four more like him.
The nearest A-rank who could even start on this is two weeks north, hunting a rumour.
So it's me.
* * *
He turned round. Thirty faces looked back at him, and every one of them was waiting.
He'd stood behind Daewon for five years. He knew how this part went. He'd just never been the one in front.
"Listen!" His voice came out of him loud and flat and certain, and it didn't crack, and some small part of him, the sixteen-year-old part, was amazed. "Civilians first. Everyone south of the river, now. E-ranks, you're on the streets: doors, carts, old people, children, get them moving. Healers to the cathedral steps, that's where the wounded go. C's and D's with me at the north gate. We don't need to kill it."
He looked at the giant again. It was close enough now that he could see the moss swinging from its arms.
"We need to slow it down. Every minute we buy is a street that gets out. Understood?"
"Understood!"
That's what he used to say. "Every minute is a man who gets home." I used to think it was just a thing captains said.
It isn't.
* * *
They met it at the gate.
For a while, it worked. The C-ranks threw everything they had at its legs, fire and ice and lightning, and the D's kept its attention, darting in and out, and the giant swung its long arms at them like a man swatting flies. Shaun went at it from the front, because someone had to, and his sword took the light the way it did when he really meant it, and he cut a gash across its shin that would have taken the leg off anything smaller.
It noticed him then.
The arm came round faster than anything that size had any right to move. Shaun got his sword up just in time. The blow didn't hit him so much as erase the ground he'd been standing on, and he went backwards across the cobbles and into a cart, and the cart went to pieces around him.
He was up before he'd decided to be. Blood in his mouth. Ribs grinding.
Get up. Captain always got up.
Jin always got up.
A D-rank girl had frozen in the middle of the road, staring up at the giant as its foot came down toward her. Shaun hit her from the side at a dead run and they rolled together into a doorway, and the foot landed where she'd been and cracked the street to the bedrock.
"Move," he told her. "Move. South. Go."
She went.
He turned back.
For one long, clear moment, standing alone in the road with the giant above him, he was absolutely sure he was going to die. It wasn't even frightening. It was just a fact, like the weather.
Jin held a boss alone in a cave so the rest of us could run. He was eighteen. He didn't even have magic.
Five years, a B on my tag and a face on every wall, and I can't hold this for ten minutes.
The giant raised both arms over its head, and brought them down on the north wall.
* * *
The wall went.
Not all of it. Just a piece, the width of three houses, the stone falling inward in a long grinding roar and a cloud of white dust that rolled down the street like a wave. When it cleared, the giant was stepping through the gap.
It was in the city.
Shaun ran.
There were still people in the street behind the wall. Too many. People who hadn't believed it, or couldn't move fast, or had gone back for something. A man with a cart full of furniture. Two old women holding on to each other. A woman with a child on her hip, trying to get through a door that wouldn't open.
The giant's head turned slowly toward the sound of the child crying.
Shaun got there first. He put himself in the road between the woman and the giant and lifted his sword.
This is stupid.
Captain would do it anyway.
The arm came down.
He met it with everything he had. For a heartbeat it held. Then his sword broke, clean, a foot above the hilt, and the blow went on through and threw him into the front of a shop. Glass and wood and stone came down on top of him.
He lay in the rubble with the broken hilt still in his hand and couldn't get up.
Through a gap in the dust he could see the giant's foot rising. He could see the woman with the child, flat against the stuck door. He could hear the child.
Sorry, Captain.
Sorry, Jin.
* * *
Then he couldn't see anything at all.
The dust from the wall had rolled up the street behind the giant and swallowed everything: the woman, the door, the foot, the sky. White, thick, choking. Shaun lay in it, blind, waiting for the sound of the foot coming down.
It didn't come.
Instead he heard something else. Something he couldn't explain, then or later, though he went over it in his head a hundred times.
One footstep. Light. Not the giant's. Somewhere in front of him, in the dust, between the giant and the door.
Then a sound like the sky being folded in half.
Then nothing.
No roar. No crash. Just the dust, settling, very slowly, and somewhere close by, the child, still crying.
* * *
When the dust cleared, the giant was dead.
It lay across the street on its back, arms flung out, its cracked bell of a face turned to the sky. In the middle of its chest there was a hole. Round, clean, about the size of a door, going all the way through to the cobbles underneath. The shops on either side of it hadn't lost a window.
The woman with the child was standing exactly where she'd been, flat against the door, alive. Staring.
There was nobody else in the street.
Shaun crawled out of the shop on his hands and knees and knelt in the road and looked at the hole for a long time.
No weapon does that.
No spell I've ever seen does that. Not even the Archmage's.
He looked up and down the street. Empty. Dust. Rubble. The woman. Nobody running away, nobody walking off. Nobody at all.
Something caught his eye in the rubble by the giant's shoulder. A scrap of cloth, snagged on a broken stone. He pulled it free and turned it over in his fingers.
It was a strip of old army cloth. Faded blue-grey, frayed at both ends. The pattern of the weave was one he knew better than his own skin, because he'd worn it every day at sixteen, on the northern front.
Pre-Gate issue.
Nobody's worn these in five years.
He didn't know why his hands were shaking. He put the strip in his pocket.
* * *
By evening the whole city had a story, and nobody had the same one.
It was a high-ranked adventurer passing through, an S-rank nobody had ever heard of, who'd done it and walked on without stopping for thanks, the way they do in the old songs. It was a secret weapon of the Empire's, tested at last. It was the Archmage, from his tower. It was the Goddess of Abundance herself, who had struck down a beast at the very foot of her cathedral, and a priest was already standing on the steps in the last of the light, arms raised, telling the crowd it was a miracle.
Somewhere at the back of that crowd, someone said, "Overlord."
Only once, and quietly. And everyone near them told them to shut up.
* * *
A few streets away, on the steps of a shuttered bakery, a young man in an old uniform sat with his elbows on his knees and watched people hurry past.
Nobody looked at him. He was dusty, and shabby, and his left sleeve was torn off at the elbow, and there was no aura on him at all.
Just a blank.
Jin waited until the street was quiet.
Then the window opened.
[Real-world actions recorded]
[Worth proven]
[Second Layer of Immortality: unlocked]
He read it, and something moved in him. Not the warmth of ki. Something deeper and stranger than that, like a door opening somewhere behind him, in a house he hadn't known he lived in.
Second layer.
He sat there a while longer, looking at the words, while the lamps came on down the street one by one, though nobody had lit them.
Worth proven.
I still don't know who I proved it to.