Halfdan Skarsgård had no plan, no cavalry, no banner, no miracle, just a golden gauntlet humming against his forearm, a deck of cards that pretended to be destiny, and the fragile memory of a girl's voice promising she'd see lilies bloom again.
"Install-"
The word left his lips like a command to the world itself. The gauntlet flared, gold light pouring through the cracks between his fingers, and the air ignited around him.
The giant charged. The river exploded. The sky tilted sideways. For a heartbeat, the world forgot how to breathe.
Power slammed through his veins like a floodgate breaking, a storm of raw, divine force bursting through every vein. For an instant, he thought he'd die a third time, body ripping apart from the inside out. It was like being struck by lightning and surviving, like swallowing the heart of a star.
His body convulsed once, and then-
Everything aligned.
Every nerve caught fire in perfect harmony. Every muscle hummed, alive with impossible strength. Every heartbeat shook the air in his chest. There was thunder in his bones, lightning in his blood. His senses erupted open.
He saw everything: the dust drifting like snowflakes in sunlight, the water droplets suspended midair, the faint shimmer of heat around the giant's massive frame. The world moved in slow motion, every detail sharp enough to cut.
Arash's instincts, steady, ancient, unflinching, merged with his own. The line between them blurred until he wasn't sure where Halfdan ended and the hero began.
The giant came like a landslide. Each step made the ground complain. A tree trunk of an arm scythed through the air, and Halfdan saw the motion in slow, deliberate slices, as if someone had decided time needed editing.
Halfdan moved before he could think. He leapt back, the bow already moving. First arrow, midair, through the giant's near shoulder. The arrowhead passed through clay plates and muscle as if the creature were made of wet paper. The giant flinched, staggered, let out a noise like a boulder coughing.
Each breath became rhythm: draw, aim, release, breathe.
Arash's instincts whispered through him like muscle memory from another life, angles, wind, trajectory. He was no longer shooting; he was conducting. The air obeyed him.
Second arrow before his boots found ground: thigh, high and inside, the kind of shot that turns a sprint into a limp. Blood came in thick, hot ropes and turned to steam where it met sunlight.
Third arrow, down the barrel of the mouth. He felt the line of the shot the way a musician hears a note before it's played. The arrow vanished between yellow teeth. The impact jolted the giant's skull back; it made a sound that was too big to be a scream and too bitter to be a roar.
"Ha," Halfdan breathed, a grin splitting his face. "Now we're talking."
For the first time since he started shooting, the damage mattered.
It felt like flying. Not with wings, wings would have been slower. He moved, and the world cooperated. He drew, and the bow promised. He inhaled, and the air helped.
Holy shit, he thought, and then, because his brain preferred to keep things casual when the universe went mythic: Okay, we can work with this.
He landed in the shallows and water clutched at his boots; he kicked free and an arrow peeled off his string, skimming the surface, lifting beads of river into a glittering arc. It slammed into the giant's left knee, and the joint gave with a crunch like shattering pottery. The monster's weight lurched sideways. It staggered, swayed, and then crashed to the earth with a rumble that rolled through the fields like distant thunder.
"Stay down," Halfdan said, already moving.
He ran up the riverbank because it gave him a shooting lane and refused to think about how an ordinary human's body was now copying a god's track meet. Arash set his cadence—two steps, draw; two steps, loose; two steps, breathe. He didn't aim so much as agree with where the arrow wanted to go.
A shot sank into the giant's ribs and came out with a little gust of air and a lot of blood. Another arrow kissed the elbow joint and severed tendons that looked like cabling. The arm fell useless, smacked the dirt, made the ground shiver.
People were shouting from somewhere behind him, villagers, scattered, stumbling, clutching one another, running toward the far tree line. He tuned them out because all the sound that mattered lived inside the giant: breath, bone, the slow, furious grind of something that had forgotten how to be afraid, learning the lesson fast.
The gauntlet whispered in his ear. Install timer: 1:22.
Right. Two minutes if he didn't screw up. Maybe less. His world narrowed to a set of numbers: angles, distances, heartbeats, the red line ticking down in the corner of his sight like fate had decided to go digital.
The giant lurched to its feet. Its eyes were wrong. They'd always been wrong, glassy, feverish, the red of cheap wine or ruined meat, ruined by his arrows not even ten minutes ago, but now they flared dull-bright, hateful, and most terrifying of all: healing. It inhaled and heat poured off it in waves; the cracks in its clay-skin went from dry riverbeds to seams full of molten light.
"Oh, come on," Halfdan said aloud. "You've got to be kidding me. Boss has a second phase?"
Halfdan stared, half in awe, half in horror.
The giant swelled. Muscles bunched; the plates of its hide slid and locked; the ragged leather skirt snapped in the wind like it suddenly remembered it had been a living thing. Its movements, which had been big and sloppy, tightened into something frighteningly efficient. The wounds he'd made crawled shut with a noise like wet sand being poured into a mold.
Berserker mode, some part of him supplied, dry as a margin note. Costs a lot of energy. Doesn't last long.
"Great," Halfdan muttered. "Let's hope 'not long' is shorter than a minute."
It charged.
He didn't try to stand his ground. Heroic deaths make great stories and terrible tactics. He ran. The river threw white at his ankles; he darted left, found a wash of stones that gave him traction, and shot into the giant's advancing shin. The arrow went in clean—and then the skin puckered, heated, and spat steam as it knitted around the shaft.
He swore and put the next shot through the giant's ear canal. That bought a second: the creature's head jerked sideways and it smacked an open palm into the ground where Halfdan had been, turning a patch of riverbank into a crater rimmed with shattered stone.
"Not a tank, got it," he said to himself. "More like a trebuchet with anger issues."
A boulder the size of a wagon wheel broke loose from somewhere, either an accident of the fight or the earth giving up on solidarity, and cartwheeled toward him. Clairvoyance lit two futures: one where he moved right and got a fractured rib, one where he ducked left and the boulder missed so close it kissed his hair.
He chose left. The rock rushed past with the smell of old heat and geology. Hair tugged at his scalp; adrenaline played drums on his heart.
Install timer: 0:54.
He needed to start thinking like someone who wouldn't have a miracle in fifty-four seconds. He carved his way up the riverbank, found higher ground and a new angle, and put two arrows into the giant's opposite knee. The leg buckled. The creature caught itself with both hands, knuckles plowing furrows into the dirt so deep they exposed veins of rock.
Arash wanted a throat shot. Halfdan wanted that too, but the giant rocked its head behind a forearm thick as a wall. The mouth, no. Teeth like broken plates, but the jaw opened and closed too fast. The eye sockets were red soup. He needed something that would slow the thing's thinking.
He drew, breathed, didn't aim so much as accepted the offer the wind made him, and sent an arrow into the soft hinge where the jaw met the ear. The arrow sank and shattered something important. The giant screamed, and the scream had structure now, a chord of pain under the noise, a little music of mortality. Its head pitched; it flailed; it tore a cedar out of the ground and threw it at him as if playing fetch wrong.
He jumped. The cedar went under him, branches snapping at his calves. He landed, rolled, fished up an arrow on reflex, and loosed into the giant's wrist while he was still on his back. The line was terrible. The shot was perfect. The arrow smashed through small bones; the giant dropped the cedar, which crashed and rolled and decided to be a bridge for the river for a few seconds.
Install timer: 0:41.
"Okay," he said through his teeth, because if he didn't talk he'd start thinking about how good it felt to be alive and he'd miss something that would make that temporary. "You're not invincible. You're just very committed to the bit."
The wind changed. The field rippled. He could smell smoke now, scattered cooking fires overturned, thatched roofs on the edge of catching. Voices gathered on the far side of fear and started to call names. He didn't let himself look. You start cataloguing faces and you stop being a bow.
He moved again, angles angles angles. The giant's steps were shorter now, meaner, the way big things move when they've remembered rage is useful. It swept a hand through a swath of fleeing villagers and Halfdan put an arrow into the inside of the elbow at full draw, Fullmuscle, whatever Arash called it when you let the bow teach your body new lessons about leverage. The hand jerked aside and smashed dirt instead of flesh. People screamed anyway, because fear is bad at math.
The giant pivoted on a heel and the world stumbled with it. It found him with its wrong red gaze and began to run.
Halfdan ran too. Not away, obliquely, a climbing curve, a line that denied straightness. The bow stayed high and the string stayed singing and the arrows blurred into a rhythm that had nothing to do with fingers and everything to do with promise. Shoulder. Collarbone. The notch above the sternum. The inside of the thigh where the femoral pulse lives.
He felt it then, the tiny staggers in the giant's pattern, the fractions of a second where its timing slipped, as if some part of it was listening to pain instead of the war drums it wanted to be. He poured arrows into those stutters. You don't kill a mountain; you avalanche it. You don't topple a tower; you remove bricks until gravity remembers its job.