<span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Times New Roman;">"By the gods," Fern hisses.  <br/><br/>Then she is on him, quicker than her breath.  Before the air has ceased to rustle with her choked words, her dagger has bitten.  The shaggy colossus has only begun to pivot by the time Fern is a slender coil by his side.  Her hand is lashing back, swift as a card trick, seeking other sinew to sever and organs to puncture.  The side of the giant she struck holds firm. <br/><br/> "Let my Kukri dispatch you to whence you came!"  Draque seethes.  Miaren is tilting the torch against the wall as he pounces.<br/><br/> "...  No pun intended.  Rargh!"  <br/><br/>Draque's snarl is underscored by a horrid grinding, as the giant's hand lunges with bestial speed to snatch up a ghastly object - a weapon made of a gnarled bar of iron nearly the size of its arm, chains and long, ragged-edged shards of iron melted to it.  It looks like a small tree, sprouting pitted, sharp branches.  It begins to swing.<br/><br/>Draque is already at its side, already slashing.   "Fern, let's keep this guy flanked!" <br/><br/>His kukri strike too fast to blur.  They are only the flashes of impact - steel blue pops of light - and then the invisibility of maneuver, counter-maneuver, aim.  The cave fills with a lilting whine as they play the air into a manic tune.<br/><br/>And now blood comes.  It arrives, tardy and slow, in long ribbons, drizzling out of the rancid downpour of hair over the giant's hip.  Almost black, the giant's blood seems like the ink on an anatomical drawing, marking hip joint, pelvis, femoral artery - Draque's lethal illustration.<br/><br/>The maw of the thing yawns wide, the great vacancy of its mouth stretching within the glittering, greenish rim of its teeth.  Its eyes roll like burning wax as agony sears them.  The weapon in its leathery paw, grabbed instants before, thunders against the stone of the cave as a paroxysm of pain shivers the giant's side.<br/><br/>It tosses its body.  The tight air of the cave seems to gag and heave.  With a loud slurp, the girl is tumbled from its swaying member.  She crashes against the wall, her head connecting first with a pronounced crack.  Then the sounds of her panting - and all else - are drown beneath the bellow of the monster.<br/><br/>The sounds imitate speaking - enough to be seeming to mock it.  A lunatic sequence of stentorian grunts and wild whines pollutes the cave.  <br/><br/>Miaren's bow raises, arrow notched.  Already, her companions are swiveling and dancing at the lumbering sides of the beast.  They stitch its flesh with an invisible flurry of motion, making its frantic, abrupt motions seem as sluggish as tallow by comparison.<br/><br/>Fern's arm is shaking.  Hitting the Thing is like stabbing into a toppling oak tree.  A sudden twist of its hip rids her of her dagger - it is rooted in the stony side of the thing.  She weaves in, balances, aims, snatches out the dagger.  A gout of black blood paints half of her face and the back of her hand - staining it in a pungent, iron reek and a heat that feels near to boiling.  <br/><br/>Draque, on the opposite side, ducks under the whip-swift snap of an arm.  His ears pop with the pressure change as the arm swing by; his hair and hackles feel a hot, stinking wind pass its teeth through them.  He is about to strike - and strike, strike, strike - when the arm crashes down at him in an instant's fraction.  It hits only empty space.<br/><br/>The giant ceases its cry with a petulant huff.  It dips to grab the weapon up again.  Miaren's arrow whispers from the snap of her bowstring.<br/><br/>The arrow smashes into the thing's hide, square in its shoulder's hillside.  The giant does not even slow.  It scrapes up the weapon again, pivoting toward Draque.  And again it grunts and roars into the air in its bubbling tongue, but now the timbre of its sounding is unmistakable:  It is calling out.<br/><br/>Fern, her dagger reclaimed, drives it toward the giant's perineum.  A puncture opens there; blood squeezes out.  But the giant is already descending, moving with the speed and chaotic ferocity of an avalanche, onto Draque.<br/><br/>It comes on like a toppling of titanic limbs, pushing a wave of stink and heat before it.  Arms lash and duck, its guard precise, its strikes pure rage.  With its mass, its thrashing, the seams in its assault that expose its body appear and close in wild, aborted instants.<br/><br/>An instant is all that Draque needs.  <br/><br/>He aims.  A blue steel pop appears on the throat of the thing.  Draque recoils.<br/><br/>The beast's roar bubbles into silence.  Blood fountains from its throat - fountains to arc five feet over the elf and spray on the wall in a muddy burst of dark liquid.  The whole mass of the giant heaves, its lambent eyes rolling in their crusted lids, their blazing mania scraping the cramped dim of the chamber.  It quivers, pivots.<br/><br/>Miaren's second arrow extinguishes one of its horrible eyes, punching the elastic bulge into a tight sphincter around the shaft.<br/><br/>The giant sighs, so loud that it whole cavern seems to sigh; it pivots more toward the exit.<br/><br/>It topples with a snap of the arrow in its skull, a snap of its rigid sex buckling against the ground.  A lake of blood rushes out from below it.  It lies still.</span>