It wasn't as if Anbaixiu had never fought powerful creatures before.
He had even fought dragons, and he hadn't found them particularly impressive.
Yet the three giants before him gave Anbaixiu an entirely different feeling. Though smaller in stature than dragons, they exuded a sense of threat far exceeding that of any dragon.
A divination wizard's premonitions were usually spot-on.
The instant the clash began, Arthur Ryan took a sweeping blow from a greatsword and was sent flying over a dozen meters away.
Although he immediately stabilized himself and re-engaged the giant in combat, that was Arthur Ryan!
Meanwhile, the other two giants didn't hold back either. The one wielding a warhammer locked onto Ariel, seemingly intent on comparing whose hammer hit harder.
That left only the axe-wielding giant charging straight toward Anbaixiu.
A massive axe came hurtling forward, carrying with it raging thunder, howling gales, and a world-shattering momentum.
Anbaixiu stood frozen in place as if paralyzed by fright, but when the axe sliced through his form, it merely cleaved through a misty phantom.
In that split second, he had cast Blur, Mirror Image, and Misty Step in succession.
Thanks to the Elven Queen's boon, the power of a legendary ranger not only honed his archery to perfection, but also accelerated Anbaixiu's spellcasting speed.
The giant axe gouged a deep trench into the stone, embedding itself into the ground, before being wrenched free by the charging giant as he continued his rush toward Anbaixiu.
Anbaixiu felt very fortunate that this axe-wielding giant hadn't mastered Gareth's chain-blade technique. If the giant could have recalled and hurled his weapon again with a mere flick of his wrist, Anbaixiu would have been run ragged just trying to survive.
Casting Misty Step once more, Anbaixiu blinked behind the giant. Such low-circle spells cost him virtually nothing now. With a wave of his hand, he fired off two casts of Haste, landing them squarely on Arthur Ryan and Ariel.
The standard warrior-mage-priest formation seemed to have been forcibly shattered by the three giants, yet Anbaixiu continued fulfilling his role as a wizard with composure.
Such was the effortless poise of a seasoned adventurer.
The trio dynamic of warrior, mage, and priest never meant the warrior stood in front absorbing damage while the mage and priest cast spells in absolute safety.
In real past adventures, no warrior could ever truly provide airtight protection for a spellcaster. Stray arrows, sudden charges, and all manner of unforeseen chaos would constantly disrupt the best-laid formations.
In such moments, if you as a wizard just waited for someone to rescue you, wouldn't you just be waiting to die?
Thus, any wizard with a few years under their belt understood precisely what to do on a chaotic battlefield: unless you were an evocation specialist capable of sparing allies from your blasts, your primary focus had to be battlefield control and support.
Flitting across the field with Misty Step, he hurled out support and utility spells one after another.
He buffed his companions with Haste, then tested a barrage of crowd-control spells—Blindness, Charm, Petrification—to gauge their effects.
To his dismay, Anbaixiu discovered that these giants possessed staggering magic resistance; the control spells proved entirely useless.
Observing more closely, Anbaixiu realized that these giants were not normal living creatures at all.
Their flesh resembled the material used to construct the archway—pitted and uneven, yet phenomenally resilient. Arthur Ryan's longsword failed to inflict significant damage, while Ariel's lightning produced no effect whatsoever. The giants could freely move bathed in lightning, utterly indifferent to whether her iron hammer was wreathed in electric arcs.
Their speed, however, remained manageable. Unable to keep pace with Anbaixiu's repeated teleports, the axe giant simply gave up on him and charged toward Ariel, aiming to eliminate the seemingly weakest woman first.
*Huge, highly resistant, immensely strong... but they're bound to have a weakness!*
Calmly, Anbaixiu cast a spell directly in the path of the giant's charge—Grease!
A massive sheet of slick yellow oil erupted, coating a patch of ground over a dozen meters across.
The moment the giant stepped onto it, his footing slipped uncontrollably, and he crashed hard onto his backside. The ground shook violently from the impact, and the axe slipped from his grasp, flying through the air.
No matter how formidable one's magic resistance was, Grease disregarded it entirely; if you lost your balance, you went down.
To be safe, Anbaixiu even tossed two Dice of Fate to ensure the giant would definitely faceplant.
The hurled axe happened to land right in front of Anbaixiu.
Without a second thought, combining Feather Fall and Mage Hand, Anbaixiu shoved the colossal weapon directly into his private storage space.
Deprived of his weapon, the giant's threat was instantly halved.
The giant flailed as he tried to scramble back to his feet, but his massive frame and clumsy, wide-arcing movements left him floundering helplessly in the grease for quite a while.
Anbaixiu chuckled. Just as he thought: large size wasn't just weak to doorways; it was weak to balance as well.
Just as he prepared to send the other giants sprawling, a flash of Holy Light erupted from Arthur Ryan's direction, so brilliant that it made Anbaixiu's skin prickle with pain.
When the light faded, the greatsword-wielding giant lay collapsed on the ground.
A deep fissure ran down the giant's skull. For a human, such a wound would have cleaved their head in two, but for a giant, it had merely split the scalp.
Yet the sword giant lay there twitching violently, as though having suffered a devastating blow.
Arthur Ryan shouted aloud, "They're undead! A very peculiar kind of undead, but my Holy Light can still purge them!"
Peculiar indeed. What kind of terrifying undead could survive a direct, full-powered smite from Arthur Ryan's Holy Light without dying instantly?
Seeing that Arthur Ryan was about to deliver a finishing strike, Anbaixiu shouted, "Arthur, go help Ariel! Leave the undead to me!"
Though Arthur Ryan was puzzled, he never wasted time arguing with an ally. With a flash of sword light, he darted to Ariel's side, joining forces with her against the last hammer-wielding giant. Meanwhile, Anbaixiu teleported directly next to the twitching giant and slammed his palm onto the open cleft in its skull.
When Anbaixiu pulled his hand back, a cluster of translucent spectral threads came with it.
This was the giant's soul—and the heroic spirit of this arena.
The moment Anbaixiu made contact with the heroic spirit, he understood its composition. It was not a singular soul, but a congregation of countless spirits of warriors who had died valorous deaths in battle.
Every warrior who perished in the arena endured in this manner, forged from raw courage and fury, retaining only their memories of combat. It was powerful precisely because of its purity.
Yet no matter how powerful a heroic spirit was, it remained a soul. With the giant incapacitated and unable to resist, Anbaixiu peeled the spirit away thread by thread, thoroughly dismantling the giant's ability to act.
*A prize!*
Heroic spirits were precisely what Anbaixiu sought. Thus, while his movements were swift, his soul-disassembly was meticulous, ensuring it could be restored to its original state intact.
Once its soul was extracted, the mighty giant ceased moving altogether.
At this point, the battle was effectively over. With the giants' weakness exposed, the encounter posed no further challenge to the warrior-mage-priest trio.
Neither Arthur Ryan nor Anbaixiu was the sort to stumble in the home stretch.
The battle concluded swiftly. The hammer giant was felled by Arthur Ryan's Holy Light, and Anbaixiu blinked in to harvest its soul. By the time the two giants were disposed of, the last one had only just managed to struggle out of the Grease spell.
It was not that the giant was exceptionally slow; rather, Arthur Ryan and Anbaixiu were simply too fast. The coordination between the paladin and the lich was nothing short of miraculous.
With his weapon gone, the remaining giant posed no threat at all, and the trio subdued him within seconds.
All three giants had their souls extracted, and Anbaixiu stored their physical bodies into his private space—a complete and decisive victory.
Reflecting on the fight, however, Anbaixiu felt a lingering pang of dread. If not for Arthur's Holy Light countering the undead, neither he nor Ariel would have been able to inflict meaningful damage on them.
Had Anbaixiu dared to reach in for a soul while the giant was still active, a single swipe of its massive palm would have shattered his skeletal form to dust.
Anbaixiu sighed with emotion. "I think I finally understand how this race offended Talos."
Ariel, who had been brooding over her subpar performance, looked over curiously upon hearing this. "Master Ultraman, what do you mean by that?"
"I mean that I've roughly pieced together why this giant civilization met its demise. Every time they held a trial, countless heroes perished in the arena. Their souls continually strengthened the spirits within these automatons, while their flesh was absorbed to reinforce the automatons' vessels.
"The inevitable result was that the more gladiatorial contests were held, the stronger the trial beasts became—and the stronger they became, the more heroes fell. Until one day, this giant civilization discovered that even the mightiest warriors of their entire race combined could no longer defeat these monsters. From that point on, no one could ever pass the arena's trial again..."
Even as Anbaixiu spoke, the projection of Talos materialized before them once more.
A colossal phantom of light loomed overhead, looking down upon the three. Its eyes alone were larger than the three giants combined.
Talos's majestic voice boomed down from the heavens.
"Well done. You guessed correctly. They all perished upon the sands of the arena because they were not as versatile as you. And that is precisely why I favored them—and why I care so little for you."
Anbaixiu was not surprised. From the moment the battle began, the light on his bracelet had gone dark.
How could Talos have possibly missed this fight? His appearance now was entirely expected.
Talos spoke with palpable nostalgia: "To fight ceaselessly, to grow perpetually stronger... Having already conquered the entire world, they used their own flesh and souls to forge even greater adversaries. Never indulging in decadence, their blood forever boiled with the joy of battle—such were the Chosen I cherished most. Though in the end they created automatons they could no longer defeat, I admired their resolve. Thus, all the giants who remained alive were brought by my hand into my divine realm, where they enjoy eternal life!
"Yet what a pity it is that the creatures who came after possessed none of that spirit."
Anbaixiu thought to himself: *Weren't they just absolute battle maniacs?* All for the amusement of a deity, generations of heroic figures had thrown their lives away for nothing, only to become an inescapable shackle for their descendants. Even if granted eternal life, Talos's divine realm was notoriously desolate; what meaning was there in such immortality?
Anbaixiu could never comprehend such a mindset, but Talos's candid confession cleared up many of his lingering questions.
The giants had once ruled the world, and the modern-day Golden Desert was likely where they had lived. That explained why they possessed vast quantities of gold—the riches of the entire world had belonged to them.
Yet gold was merely an ornament and an offering for their rituals. The giants never indulged in luxury; they were addicted solely to combat.
At Talos's behest, they had constructed the Arena of the Storm, embarking on centuries of unrelenting, bloody combat.
Anbaixiu surmised that the vast majority of giants were warriors. They shunned fancy tricks, preferring to swing heavy axes and hack away at each other in the most primal fashion. Consequently, when an opponent possessed greater strength, tougher skin, and superior combat technique, the heroes entering the arena had no hope of winning.
In Anbaixiu's eyes, this was a vicious cycle; in the eyes of the giants, it was their ultimate purpose in life.
In the end, who knew how many lives had been sacrificed before the entire race earned the privilege of ascending to the divine realm.
No wonder those subterranean cities were utterly deserted, devoid of even a single corpse, leaving behind only mountains of gold. They hadn't died off or migrated; they had ascended as a collective into the divine realm. Gold was entirely meaningless to them, so there had been no need to take it along.
Every piece of the puzzle fell into place. Even Anbaixiu hadn't anticipated that such a glorious civilization had vanished through sheer self-destruction.
Still, none of that mattered now. Anbaixiu addressed Talos: "So, mighty Lord of Storms, I wonder what reward I might receive this time?"
Talos let out a booming laugh. "You stole the heroic spirits left behind by the arena, and you still have the gall to ask me for a reward?"
"Spoils of war are inviolable—is that not one of your holy tenets, Lord of Storms?" Anbaixiu was just about to haggle with Talos when a sudden realization struck him.
"Wait... What exactly did you mean by that? Are these three the only heroic spirits left in the entire arena?"
Chapter 466