Aris let out a slow, unhurried breath, letting go of the tension in his limbs as he let the giant close the distance between them. Even though it clearly lacked a proper tongue to speak, the noise its body itself made while moving seed to resemble a dark, intelligible language. It was not sound exactly, more like pressure, the kind that settled behind the eyes and suggested, at a register below language in all its morbidity, in one’s instinct, that the thing producing it had never needed to negotiate with anything in its life.
It was interesting.
He found it less interesting than dinner, but interesting nevertheless.
The giant brought its good arm down in a vertical strike—no more sweeping, it had learned sothing from the last exchange, which ant it was the adaptive kind and not the simple kind. Aris stepped inside the arc of it the way you stepped through a closing door, close enough that the displaced air pressed flat against him.
He pressed one hand against its leg.
The alabaster skin was cold. Smoother than it looked. He noted this the way he noted most things in dungeons—clinically, without particular feeling, the sa way he noted the temperature of the chamber and the position of the other party mbers and the specific quality of the mana density in the air, all of it sorted and filed and given exactly the weight it deserved.
A mont of quiet tension as the giant turned to attack him once again.
He let his aspect flow through.
Not everything. Never everything. But more than he’d used since entering this chamber, more than he’d used in front of other people in longer than he cared to calculate, a controlled release that moved through his hand and into the thing in front of him like a key turning in a lock.
The entropy didn’t announce itself. That was the nature of it—it didn’t explode or ignite or crack the air with light. It simply found every system in the giant that depended on order to function, every precise and interconnected process that allowed sothing this large to be this coordinated, and it introduced a single, elegant question.
What if you didn’t.
Curiosity was truly the damnation of existence.
The giant stopped.
Not like sothing hit. Not like sothing broke. It stopped the way a clock stopped, mid-motion, the intention still visible in its posture, the follow-through simply absent.
The too-many eyes moved, all of them at once, a chaotic sweep of motion that ended, sohow, on him. Then sothing in that gaze shifted.
For just a mont, Aris thought it looked confused, indignation at worst, maybe.
He almost felt bad about it. Not exactly sure why himself.
Then the giant’s legs buckled at the precise structural points he’d selected, the joints and the tendons, and it ca down in sections, first the knees, then the torso, catching itself on one arm before that too found the question unanswerable—and settled on the chamber floor in a heap of long pale limbs that had forgotten how to be a threat.
It wasn’t dead. He hadn’t killed it.
He had, in the gentlest technical sense, simply made it stop working.
The difference mattered to him, though he’d have found it difficult to explain to anyone why.
He stepped back, straightening up, and drew everything in again—slow and careful, coiling it back against his ribs where it belonged, the familiar ache of compression resettling like a familiar weight. His hand was fine. No marks, no burn, nothing that would require explaining. That was the other thing about entropy, wielded precisely, it left no evidence on the person doing the wielding.
Very clean. Very convenient.
Then he rembered that there was going to be witnesses today.
Maybe it was a little too clean, now that he thought about it.
He turned around.
Gareth had finished with the first giant. The chamber was settling into the particular quiet that followed violence—ragged breathing, soone asking about injuries on the east side, the mana crystals overhead pulsing with the dungeon’s death cycle as the core began to register that it had lost.
Gareth was looking at him from across the chamber, chest heaving, great sword lowered.
The look on his face was not the look of a man who had seen what he expected to see.
Aris t it with an expression of mild, cooperative interest and said nothing.
In the silence, from the east side of the chamber, he heard Silas’s voice, steady and calm, telling soone to keep pressure on the wound. Good. He was useful in exactly the ways that mattered. Aris appreciated that about him, that man used his powers better than anyone else he had ever seen. To protect.
He looked back at the giant folded on the floor at his feet.
He turned around, raising his voice just enough so that everyone could hear him.
"I demobilized it, soone finish the job for ."
Then he looked at his hand.
He closed it slowly, and let the last of the tension go.
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