“Submit!” came the thunderous voice of the angelic titan. “Submit and you, who is desecrating our legacy, will be granted a swift and painless death. Resist, and you will know suffering!”

Everyone ignored it nor did they take its words to heart. A painless death was obviously being crushed by that gigantic sword that it wielded, and that didn’t sound much better than the eternal suffering it promised. What was it going to do if they resisted… hold back in order to not kill them in an instant? That would merely provide them with an opening.

It raised its sword and lowered its shield, beginning to move forward in a charge. Unfortunately, it was so big that although the shield covered much of its body, the titan’s legs were completely exposed.

“Those with magic that can immobilize, attack its legs and stop it from moving! The rest of you move the unconscious people to the side and out of the way.”

“Yes, vice-captain!” The Trista hunters scrambled to follow her orders, with most of the front liners and their superior strength dragging their comrades to a corner, while the hunters more skilled at magic raised their weapons, constructing a spell in the air.

Different hunters and different spells took different amounts of time to cast, but sooner rather than later, streaks of white flew toward the feet of the titan along with jets of blue. The ice froze the water that spilled onto the ground from the spells and when the titan stepped onto the surface that was covered with a thick slab of ice, it slipped and fell with an enormous crash, throwing up a cloud of dust.

A cheer went up from the hunters at their early victory.

“Did we get it?” a frost mage asked, peering into the thick dust. He clutched his staff that was tipped with a blue gem tightly.

Some were hopeful while others were skeptical.

“Maybe?” another hunter said. “It’s so big. Anything that big made of stone should shatter on impact, right? Did you hear anything?”

The hunters shook their heads. “The sound of the fall itself was too loud. I couldn’t hear anything else.”

However, Camilla raised her hand. In that exchange just now, she had been useless since neither of her two affinities were particularly useful. “I heard it. After the fall, there was more noise that sounded like rocks falling.”

The frost mage’s eyes lit up. “So it shattered, right? We turned its size against it.”

“Probably…?” Camilla didn’t think it would be so easy, but what she heard was unmistakable. So why did she have such a bad feeling about what was to come? The density of the holy mana hadn’t gone down at all, and the earth mana in the air was as rich as ever.

“No, you’re wrong. A statue would have broken, but I said that stone constructs are something different entirely. You can call them animate statues, but really, the appearances don’t matter,” Cadaelia said. She explained more when the hunters shot her questioning glances. “It looks like a bunch of stones that’s bound together into a desired shape, but it’s true form is a core.”

“Core…” Camilla echoed. So a stone construct was essentially an undead, in a sense. Kagriss had a core that, if broken, would kill her instantly. Kagriss usually had hers in her chest, shielded from the front by the moonstone that contained all her clothes, but she could move it around if she wished. “I guess that in order to beat it for good, we’ll have to either destroy the core or exhaust it. So where is it?”

She had no desire to fight a battle of attrition against a construct so close to its source of power.

Unfortunately, Cadaelia shrugged. “It could be anywhere, its head to its heart to a single toe. The only way to tell is by breaking the golem apart and seeing which parts come together first.

Camilla immediately looked at the cloud of dust from the titan’s fall. However, she couldn’t see through it. The only sound she could hear was rocks tapping against one another as they presumably came back together to reform the titan.

“Does anyone want to volunteer and head into the fog? You could bring back some info about which parts have regenerated and which parts haven’t.”

Her question earned her a bunch of glares and looks of disdain. “Why don’t you go yourself?”

“Why should I do something so dangerous?” Camilla shot back, crossing her arms. “Who knows if it’s waiting for us inside with a hand already formed, ready to crush us into paste. Or maybe it’ll break a few bones before tossing us into a corner to save for tormenting later?”

She laughed at her last suggestion.

The atmosphere froze up as neither side was willing to budge or go first. In the end, it was the titan’s low, gritty groan that shattered the impasse that Camilla and the other hunters were at. The groan raised in volume, turning into a roar.

A burst of mana came from its massive shadowy form, sending a ripple through the air and blast away from the dust, revealing the titan once more.

“Told you that it’ll be up soon.” Camilla muttered. She sighed. “That must have used so much mana, and yet it can still afford to waste it. Life just isn’t fair.”

“That’s not very helpful, is it?” asked a hunter.

“I was just reminding you just in case you don’t have working eyes and can see that it’s standing up,” Camilla shot back. “Aren’t you planning on charging, anyhow?”

The hunter that she was arguing was a large orc front liner, newly returned from evacuation duty. He held a great shield and a mace.

As the hunter was about to argue with her, Cadaelia cut in between them. “Enough talk,” she said, “and let’s get moving. Go feel it out.”

The front liner shot one last glare at Camilla before beckoning to the other armored folks, and they trudged off toward the titan that had once again turned its sights on the gathered group of hunters in a defensive formation while in the corner, especially the mages that made it slip.

The onslaught of front liners forced it to redirect its attention to the people right in front of it.

With a low roar, the titan swung, bending its knee in order to have the blade sweep through the space the front liners’ bodies occupied. However, it’s massive height made it hard to aim and the angle was too steep.

Even though the slash was well aimed, the angle of the sword made it so that the front liners merely had to dash forward a few steps or drop into a roll to avoid the sword. The passage of the huge weapon gave rise to a dull howl that made the hairs of anyone nearby stand on end.

One person almost didn’t make it and the sword ripped the shield out of his hands, sending it flying across the room. Without the shield, the hunter became much nimbler.

Although the damage was devastating, after seeing the titan in action, the nervousness fluttering in Camilla’s heart disappeared. “It’s really slow. If we have enough space, we can easily avoid it,” she said. “Perhaps it might be better that so many people left? If there was a lot, there wouldn’t be enough space to scatter, and someone will almost certainly get hurt. Not that it’s a problem for me though.”

Her wings sprouted from a gap in her armor. She flapped them once and took flight, riding on the air with the help of the magic in her wings.

“I’ll back you up,” Kagriss called after her.

“Got it!” Camilla called back. Once she was high enough, she folded her wings and made a pass at the titan’s neck. Up close, she realized that the titan wasn’t as big as she thought it was. The neck was perhaps a meter in diameter at most even when covered by the stone armor.

As she passed by, she swung her sword. The edge easily bit into the first layer of stone, accompanied by the sound of shattering rock. Little chunks flew out in all directions. “First, I’m going to try and take its head!” she announced. If she got help, great. If she didn’t, that was fine as well since that was less distractions for her.

Pulling back away, Camilla turned and observed her handiwork. She hadn’t done as well as she expected to. Although her greatsword should’ve easily been able to cut straight through solid stone, the titanic statue was made of harder material after being reinforced by magic.

Her slash had only left a gash about a third of a meter deep. “Tsk, tsk. Another round.”

After her first flyby, the titan had noticed her, abandoning its targets on the ground, and reaching toward her, but it was just too slow. She easily dodged by its hard and lopped off two fingers before continuing her way toward its next.

As she neared, Camilla narrowed her eyes, focusing on the gash already on the back of the titan’s neck. Speeding by the titan’s head, she flared out her wings to pull her to a stop and lined up her sword. When she swung, the edge sank into the gash she had already created, deepening the hole.

Just when she was about to pull her sword out and make a run for it, Kagriss’s voice reached her.

“Leave some of your mana behind! It might interfere with its reformation!”

“Got it!”

A huge pulse of undead mana mixed with blood mana splashed from her sword and embedded deep inside the cut she made in the rock. But that didn’t seem enough. “Why stop there? I can do better.”

Camilla channeled even more mana through her sword and left a red sphere behind in the crack. Once done, she backed off a fair distance and then pointed her sword, closing her eyes. Her lips moved. “Burst!”

The moment the words left her mouth, the back of the titan’s neck blasted apart with an explosion with black and gold mana that both seemed to suck in the surrounding light yet radiated like a small star. The head was blown straight off the neck, crashing to the ground.

However, Camilla shook her head when she saw the aftermath. The results were nowhere as spectacular as she expected, because in the end, the target of the mixture of mana wasn’t organic. A bit of the stone was turned to dust, disintegrated by the twisted power of her spell, but the rest of the titan was intact except for the fact that it was decapitated.

She followed the head with her eyes, watching for any unexpected changes.

While she was distracted, the other continued focusing on the titan’s main body, and even without a head, the titan continued to move.

“The core is not in the head!” someone shouted.

An instant later, a warning came from Kagriss. “Milla, watch out!”

Camilla’s head snapped back toward the titan, just in time to see its huge sword flying in the direction she was flying. Without Kagriss’s warning, she would have flown right into it. But even flaring her wings would be too late so she held up her sword between herself and the massive weapon, hoping for the best.

The sword of stone slammed into the flat of her blade with enormous power, knocking her away. The force smashed her sword against her bracing arm, shattering bone and the fragments pierced through her flesh, grinding against her armor. She flew through the air and smashed into the ground, cracking some of the bones in her wings.

Despite not feeling the pain, Camilla winced nonetheless at the seriousness of the injuries. Her frown deepened when she looked at her sword and found cracks in the center of the sword, severing the spine in two.

Helpless, she could only recall her weapon until it was repaired in her blood.

The power that the titan wielded wasn’t surprising due to its size, but it still awed her nonetheless. It smacked her out of the sky like a person would a fly, albeit a really big fly—a bird, perhaps.

Thankfully, the other hunters were now harassing the giant, not allowing it to head her way to finish it off. Taking a deep breath, Camilla began to repair her shredded muscles and push her bone fragments back into place, speeding up her healing.

A moment later, a tall figure dropped down next to her, pouring a mana that felt as refreshing as the water of a mountain spring into her, helping her heal. Camilla sighed in relief. “Thank you, Kagriss.”

Kagriss glared at her. “Pay more attention, what if I hadn’t warned you?!”

“I’m sorry… it won’t happen again…”

“It better not!”