Paul’s screams rivaled the giant’s bellow. Elvis and I tried to hold him down but our weight was zero impediment to his monstrous strength even with his bones improperly fused together. I even tried to remove his leverage by submerging his legs in the dirt but Elvis’ grip was more than enough for Paul to swing his body around.

  “You have to let us!” I hollered, futilely shaking at the human shaped nuclear furnace. His skin was hot as if the sun itself were burning inside of him.

  “We need three of me to hold him!” Elvis picked up Paul from behind and held him up like a baby. Paul looked like a bug that had been tortured by a small kid, his limbs bent and waving in the air. He couldn’t reach Elvis at all and for the moment, that was all we needed.

  “Babe! Do it before he heals fully!” I screamed, fighting to be heard over Paul’s shrieks of pain and anger.

  My wife landed behind Elvis, her hands wreathed in blue mists. Each rebreak sounded like a fifty cal going off. His bones were far harder than steel. After fixing the two most visible breaks, my wife slumped to the ground, spent.

  “One more babe! Just one more.” I pleaded, scooping up my wife.

  “Get me my bag.” She said, exhaustion making her voice real quiet. I hauled the wagon closer and pulled out the last seed pod from a bag. Her face scrunched up. “Uhg, they stop tasting good after the first one.”

  “Babe, please, choke it down. If we don’t fix his leg, he may never walk again. Nobody else is strong enough to do this. Eli especially is a long way off from being able to do this part.”

  She gave me a wry grin through her exhaustion. “Remember when I used to ask you to open jars?”

  I nodded slowly, squinting at her in the early afternoon light.

  Sandra took three large bites, finishing off the fruit and chuckling. “My brain has more muscles than your body right now.”

  Playfully glaring at her, I turned her around and forced myself to watch the macabre sight of Paul’s limbs seemingly rebreak themselves and orient properly.

  “Here! Here!” Elvis set Paul down in the wagon after picking up Thomas.

  “I’m good, I can stand now.” Thomas growled, putting most of his weight on the side of the wagon. “I’m not a fucking invalid.”

  “Anymore.” I growled back. “You almost died. You’re-”

  “Lucky. I know, bro. I know. That was a close call.”

  Eli channelled more solar power infused healing into Paul via his First Aid kit. Moments bled into minutes as Eli’s face paled.

  “That’s enough of that!” I ripped Eli’s hand off his toolbox and scooted it away. “We don’t need you dyin’ and Paul is out of the woods. See, he’s got color in his cheeks.”

  Thomas squinted at me. “Uhm, he’s black. Of course he has color.”

  A look of horror crossed Elvis’ face. “You can’t-”

  My brother laughed. “It was a joke. Chill. Black folks get pale too, blood loss or shock. I’m not a moron.”

  “Cut the jokes.” Sandra sat up a bit, one hand pulling wayward hairs behind her ear. “Too many people are hurt. We need to get back home.”

  I stood up. “You’re right babe. We’re exposed out here. We got who we came for and-”

  The oak trees thirty yards behind us suddenly flattened. We all jumped and turned to see two more giants step between the shattered trunks as if they were just walking through tall grass. These giants were over thirty feet high and they resembled the first giant the way a parent resembles their kid. Instead of rags and clubs and a stone knife, these giants wore actual hide armor with stitching. Their clubs were trimmed down, shaped to be an actual club form with what looked like elephant tusks shoved through them. Metal knives and bigger trophy skulls adorned their belts.

  “We are so totally boned.”

  “We need to run.”

  Fear shot through me hotter and faster than a blast from a shotgun two inches from my chest. My world flickered as all I could see was enveloping darkness, our encroaching deaths by a force we had zero chance of defeating. It took everything we had to kill one giant and two more BIGGER giants came out of the woodwork to finish the job.

  “Boss?” Elvis shook me by the shoulder. “What do we do?”

  We heard alien shouting behind us and the giants in front of us perked up. The one on the left said that strange word again, “Dwerga?” The slightly shorter one on the right nodded and pointed at the giant we’d killed. They both licked their lips and stomped forward, bending and pulling out their knives.

  “Get moving, NOW!” I hissed as quietly as I could. “Elvis, haul ass, that way!”

  It was a miracle of miracles that the giants ignored us. Elvis pulled the wagon eastward away from our house and towards the alien voices but he had to. The two big giants were directly between us and the direction our house lay. I turned just before we went around some trees to see what they were doing. Without a care in the world, they were harvesting the dead body of the dead giant. One of them was eating it raw, its crooked teeth gnawing on the femur.

  “Faster!” I hissed, pushing the cart. I didn’t even think about going back to pick up my warhammer.

  “Stop talking!” Sandra hissed back. “Just push!”

  I ran up to get beside Elvis. “Yo, we’ll keep going straight until we hit the train station. It’s up on a big hill which we can use to get out of sight before swinging south and making a big look to get back home. Hopefully, the hilly landscape will help us hide.”

  “Can you talk any quieter?” Thomas snapped, jogging painfully next to the wagon. “One fucking giant was more than enough for this lifetime. Mommy and Daddy giant looking for revenge? Pass.”

  “I don’t think they were too tore up about their kid, bro.” I said, turning a hint green. “You didn’t see what I did, they were butchering him up, having themselves a feast.”

  Elvis kept pulling the wagon, his head looking left and right so he could plot the smoothest route. “Where in the world did giants come from? Everything we’ve seen so far mutated or blended together or gigantified? But those things, those were like us?”

  “Like us HOW?” Thomas asked. “Last I checked, I wasn’t three stories tall.”

  “Like, human, advanced or somethin’. They had actual clothes and tools and weapons.”

  Thomas clenched his jaw. “Damn. You got a point.”

  “All that means is move fucking faster!”

  So we did. We hustled up and down a few small hills past the demolished brick buildings that used to be a pizza shop with a massive stone oven that only served hand made pizzas. Sandra groaned as we passed the skeleton of one of her favorite coffee spots on the right.

  “We can go past the train station by going underneath the overhand with the train tracks, hang a right past the big hill, then follow that road until we hit route three.”

  “That’s way too far?!” My wife shook her head. “Who knows what monsters we’ll see trying to do that big a loop. Just take the right at the tavern and then cut across Kenmore. A few small turns and we’re home.”

  “Change of plans, guys.”

  Elvis pulled us up short as we reached the train station. The building itself used to sit up on top of a two story hill with steep sides and plenty of stairs for getting up there for boarding. But the tracks themselves were gone and the station remained but instead of a hill underneath it, it was a massive stone arch that served as an entryway to a humongous tunnel going down. And in front of that tunnel was a crowd of hundreds of people, or short people covered in metallic armor.

  “Are those . . . dwarves?” Thomas leaned out of the wagon, squinting and holding up one hand to ward off the sun so he could see. “They’ve got knockoff Iron Man armor and broken down mechs over there!”

  “Forget the Oompa Loompas, they’re fighting giants!”

  “Should we help them?”

  Fear and fascination fought within us as we forced ourselves to come to grips yet again with the fact that the Earth we knew was long gone. They were in fact dwarves that we were staring at. Their armor was a steam-punk re-imagining of European plate armor. Gears and liquid filled bottles adorned shoulders and the line of the spine on the back plates, their helmets wider than I expected but that did fit with the short, squat builds of the dwarves. Instead of everyone carrying weapons, most of them were holding wickedly sharp picks and shovels with unusually sharp, bladed heads. Broken down mechanical suits of armor several times larger than they were knelt down in dust.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  The two giants they were fending off kept shouting, “DWERGA!” Their clubs bounced off the tower shields that locked together, reminding me of the Roman shieldwall, only their shields were less curved, more Lego-like at the edges. They actually locked together with a burst of steam from the sides.

  “Giants behind us. Giants in front of us. What are we doing, boss?”

  “We should help them!” I turned my disbelieving eyes on Sandra.

  “Are you out of your everloving MIND?” I huddled closer to her. “Those giants are even bigger! You want me to what, charge at them? You’re outta gas and Paul’s outta commission. Your safety is far more important to me than those dwarves!”

  Her small hands took my face in her firm grip and turned my head to look at the crowd of dwarves.

  “Hun. Look again. They have kids.”

  My heart sank as I took another look. She was right. That crowd of dwarves wasn’t a band of fighters. If anything, they were mostly workers carrying tools. Less than a tenth of their number wielded actual weapons and those could’ve easily doubled as mining implements. I saw mothers holding kids, elderly dwarves standing bravely in front of mothers, and teens holding tools and weapons far too big and heavy for them to wield them effectively.

  I cursed. “Awwww, fuck me. Fuck this!”

  “Grant, we have to help them.”

  It didn’t help that the giants weren’t fighting just to fight the dwarves. Their behavior was more akin to a cat trying to tease out a mouse from a haystack or a pack of wolves attempting to remove just one cow from the herd. Their big clubs didn’t swing, more like poked at the dwarven shield wall and pushed to the side, knocking over whomever they could.

  “I can’t leave you.”

  My argument fell on deaf ears as my wife forced herself to get out of the wagon and stand up. She pointed to a copse of small trees poking out of a boxwood brush.

  “Put Paul, Eli, and Thomas there. The three of us can do this.”

  Our plan ended up being simple. It took me a minute to properly hide the wagon and its occupants and then another minute to Macgyver some shenanigans that would turn the tide in favor of the dwarves.

  “We still don’t know if they’ll even be friends or if they’re a bunch of goddamn cannibals too.”

  “Anybody notice that we’ve seen more giants and dwarves than actual people?”

  “Shut up Thomas.”

  “I’m just saying, it’s weird!”

  Sandra picked Thomas up telekinetically and pushed him back into the brush. “Not now Thomas!”

  Four hardened chunks of stone twice the size of beachballs took shape in front of me, soaking up power until they were several times more dense than they should be.

  “Aim for their knees if you can, their ankles if you can’t. The goal is to knock them over flat.” I explained, patting the orbs of stone and tapping my own knee. “Elvis and I will attack from behind, Sandra, you shoot at the knees. If they’re anything like us, it takes far less pressure to break a knee from the side than the front.”

  She rolled her eyes at me and made finger quotes. “Theoretically, right?”

  “Everything is technically theoretical!”

  “Can I have a bigger weapon? Something that can maybe put a dent in them?”

  Nodding in agreement, I used Terrastria to pull up more rock and shape a humongous stone cleaver fit for a superhuman. I poured as much energy into it as I dared, passing it to Elvis with a grunt.

  “A beast fit for putting down a beast.” I said proudly.

  My ward hefted the club with a grunt, using both hands to get a grip and place it on his shoulder like a batter getting ready to swing.

  “Not my favorite sport but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t good at it.”

  ********

  Yerth - Yeldin MacStone

  “Virgin world my hairy arse!”

  Maelyin MacStone’s cursing was rare but well deserved when she decided to foul the air. Their clan’s gathering just outside the largest portal exit to Yerth was a scene of absolute celebration and relief, the sunshine casting their doubts and woes and fears away, the Abhorrent no longer chasing them through the darkened tunnels of the Labyrinth. Not an hour after arriving, barely enough time to begin scrying efforts in earnest to find a new home, giants had arrived. And her cavern cannon only had one shot left.

  At first there were four, but two left to do who knows what. The two that were left, the tallest and therefore the oldest, abused the long reach of their arms and clubs to shatter the dwarves' defensive formations. With skin thicker than a rhino mole and beast fur on top of that, Yeldin did not hold out hope for a timely rescue.

  The only strategy left after exhausting their arsenal during the journey through the Labyrinth was to swarm the giants with their numbers and turn the remaining Minexo suits into unstable bombs. But that was the barest sliver of hope.

  Until hope struck harder than an avalanche.

  Both giants fell as their knees buckled underneath, something faster than a bullet scything through their legs. Clouds of dust billowed up completely covering any sort of visibility. The dwarves froze for only a second before their training kicked in; each shield wall steadily backed up away from where the giants had fallen to regroup in front of the tunnel entrance.

  Sounds of struggle and pain were muffled in the dust before going silent after a few minutes. With a whoosh, the dust slammed back into the ground to reveal the giants mostly buried facedown into the dirt.

  “Humans! How?”

  Gemson MacStone, Yeldrin’s second in command, looked up sharply. His thick arms were deep in the Minexo suit covered in grease and dirt.

  “Do they have wizards? When did they become powerful enough to fight giants?”

  Maelyin held her cannon close to her chest, crouched behind a shield formation. “Where am I aiming?” She called out, looking between the strange humans hamstringing the giants. The big scary human wielding a massive cleaver was hacking at the neck of the giant that appeared to be drowning in quicksand.

  “AT THE GIANTS, WOMAN!” Yeldin barked. He held a small hammer and wrench as he tried to assist Gemson in repairing the Minexo suit.

  “If I can reroute the locomotive power to the pressure drill, and override the safety pins by snipping the reinforcement cables . . .” Gemson muttered, his legs sticking out of the open side of the mining exoskeleton suit. “Did we use all the explosive magicite charges?”

  A relatively clean dwarf covered in heavily inscribed robes and a wide gas mask stepped forward. “Here Tunnel Sergeant. We have two charges left, sir.”

  “Don’t call me ‘sir’. I work for a goddamn living.”

  “Yes, Tunnel Sergeant.”

  Yeldin carefully took one of the charges and handed it to Gemson. “Will this help, lad?”

  “Did Amark put the right trigger in the formation circle? Or did he put the slow timer one like he usually does? Eh, doesn’t matter. Either works.” Gemson pulled his head out of the MinExo suit for a moment. “Hold on, did I hear someone say humans were helping us?”

  He peeked over the almost shattered pauldron of the Minexo suit to see a woman with almost white hair floating in a halo of blue energy angrily shouting at two other males, both of which were very different sizes. The large one was covered in so much blood that he looked to be covered in black and the smaller but older male was working some kind of Earth Magic.

  Gemson leaned forward, his eyes bugging out of his skull. “That can’t be? Blessed by Soil Itself? Do the Bones of this World bless humans?”

  “Stuff it, gear troll and get back to work!” Yeldin growled, forcefully placing the explosive charge in Gemon’s grease covered hand. “Talk religion AFTER we kill the fucking giants.”

  Gemson muttered darkly under his breath. “If Death herself wasn’t always breathing our necks I’d show you-”

  Yeldin smacked him on the head. “Show me spine LATER! Show me a dead giant NOW!”

  The lead mechanic pulled himself out of the Minexo suit’s guts and climbed into the cockpit. He only strapped in his left arm and flicked a few switches with his right.

  “Just tell me where to aim and when to fire, Tunnel Sergeant. Only one shot left on this but it should be a massive hole in even a giant’s chest.”

  Maelyin hollered. “It smacked the crazy human off! But they’re both still down and exposed! I’m taking the shot!”

  Instead of aiming and firing from the safety of the shield wall, Maelyin’s stubby legs churned the dirt like a horse hearing the starting pistol. She tore across the broken landscape, skidding to a stop ten feet in front of the closest giant. Horror almost made her freeze, the giant’s face being pulled into the dirt as if the very earth were alive. Dirt, dust, and pebbles flowed up and into the giant’s nostrils and mouth. Every time its hands reached out for purchase to pull itself up out of the ground, the very earth swallowed it or flowed away.

  Maelyin stabbed her last vial of liquid magicite into the shoulder socket of the gauntlet, power streaming out of it and overcharging the cavern cannon.

  “Eat this!”

  A small cone of electrified iron at the tip of the cannon shot out, propelled by the ignited electrum, turning into a lance of liquified metal that cut straight through the giant’s eye. In the span of a second, the giant experienced his eye turning into bloody steam just before his brain stopped registering all pain signals because it too liquified.

  The gauntlet itself wasn’t meant to endure such limit breaking use. The brass sigils etched into the inside of the gauntlet gave way to the intense heat, searing Maelyin’s arm and burning her arm to the metal.

  Luckily for her, the second giant did not get the chance to exact revenge in her moment of vulnerability. The tip of the Minexo suit’s chisel tool fired out and stuck into the nose of the other giant, the magicite explosive charge strapped to the side. Against all reason, the giant stuck its head down into the flowing dirt to scrape off the makeshift bomb.

  That only served to concentrate the explosive force back into the giant’s head.

  Yeldin looked on in awe as the largest human jumped back on top of the almost assuredly dead giant, proceeding to hack away at its neck with a vengeance. The smaller male glared coldly, his right fist and making a pulling down motion. Dirt swirled as both giants sank until only the backs of their heads were exposed. Two pointed columns of stone grew out of the ground and the smaller male gestured towards the floating human woman.

  A wicked, almost cruel smile creased her face as she floated closer to the stone obelisks, lifting them with her mind and hammering them into the giants’ skulls one at a time. She did not stop until the stone spears were completely gone from view.

  Gemson turned to Yeldin. “I’m afraid to ask . . . but are they on our side?”