They did not kill the Giant immediately. Kings do not kill Legends quickly; they dismantle them.
They chained Bilal to the massive oak gears of his own Water Mill. He was forced to his knees.
What followed in the plaza of Axiomra was the true face of the Viking Age. The soldiers, enraged by the long siege and drunk on the promise of holy plunder, unleashed the darkest horrors of the human soul.
They dragged the remaining citizens—the weavers, the scholars, the medics who had stayed behind to tend the wounded—into the snow. Bilal strained against the chains, his muscles tearing, roaring in a primal, throat-shredding agony as he was forced to watch.
He watched the women who had baked the cakes and translated the math be brutalized in the mud by laughing mercenaries. He watched the young men he had raised from orphans be put to the sword.
To the reader sitting in the comfort of modern times: This is the cost of the epic battles you cheer for. When the walls fall, the innocent pay the debt of the Kings. The Giant of Axiomra, the man who cured death and built a utopia, was reduced to a weeping, broken father, begging Allah for the mercy of a swift death for his people, while the "Holy Army" turned his paradise into a slaughterhouse.