Time slowed, every breath, heartbeat, and vibration in the mist became deafeningly clear.
Cain stood dead center — dab smack in the middle of it all.
His mind churned furiously, possibilities flashing through his head like lightning strikes.
'Go invisible? Quick dash to the side? Throw a decoy? Charge up another spell?'
A thousand thoughts surged through him — but his body didn't wait for permission.
His reflexes, drilled into his bones took over.
If you have no other choice, his grandfather had said, raise your firearm.
Cain moved on instinct.
Both pistols snapped up in a single smooth motion, barrels leveled not at Ragta — but at Midi and Dilim.
It wasn't a bluff, this wasn't theater.
At this distance, Cain stood in lethal range.
Twenty meters — a point-blank range to his hands.
He had four shots preloaded.
Enough to put two clean bullets into each giant — one into the heart, one into the skull.
No flourish, not even second chance.
If he fired, Cain would kill them — guaranteed.
It was a brutal calculation. The kind Cain had long since learned to make.
The odds split cleanly in his mind/
'Zero if Ragta, out of pride, refused to intervene. Believing it dishonorable to shield injured kin from death.'
'One hundred if Cain pulled the trigger without hesitation and Ragta valued them too much to sacrifice.'
Cain didn't fight for honor — his grandfather once spat in his face the moment he mentioned trading life for life.
If the window opened even for a fraction of a second — he would take it.
And walk out unscathed, leaving two corpses behind.
His fingers tap-ready on the touch triggers.
The choice hung in the air — waiting for the first mistake.
Ragta locked eyes with the human. His instincts screamed for action, but he forced himself still.
He couldn't judge the situation by sight alone — not now, not with so much at stake.
He lacked the refined senses for this.
Healing arts, battlefield triage —t hose had never been his strength.
He had trained with scythes and chains from the moment he could walk, honing weapons, not medicine.
Ragta regrated not reading more about human firearms — but there were no ifs in the battlefield.
The devastation that Cain had wrought earlier was seared into his mind.
Ragta had seen what they could do — destroying an entire face with silent triggers.
Now Midi and Dilim lay before him — both grievously wounded, both defenseless. Ragta's hands twitched around the hafts of his twin scythes.
He tried to calm the war drum beating in his chest, forcing himself to think.
'What if there was another explosion waiting? What if the human I'm seeing is a decoy? Humans used tricks. They used tripwires. Illusions.'
The mist still curled thick in the air. One wrong move could tear his world apart.
Ragta knew too well — the brutal truth every giant learned in the tribe.
If he failed to bring Midi and Dilim home, alive and breathing, no excuses would save him.
No honor to his name, no record of victories — and his words would never be trusted in his lifetime.
So he stood there, locked in an invisible war of hesitation and threat.
The human's pistols held steady.
Ragta's scythes trembled slightly.
The timer ticked forward — not measured by words or declarations, but by the heavy, pounding approach of the golemite charging closer.
Their frozen standoff wouldn't last long. They each had only moments left to decide.
Fight or fold.
Cain was waiting. Not for Ragta, he knew he wouldn't commit for a gambling move.
He was waiting for the golemite.
He knew Midi and Dilim were already marked in the creature's growing logic for elimination.
They had brought it pain, and harm — it would not hesitate once it was close enough.
And Ragta? Cain could see it in his posture. He was thinking the same.
Neither side trusted the other to stand down.
But Cain didn't rely on a single plan — he never had.
With a flick of his wrist, he burned through a precious second.
Instantaneous magic, activating Titan Sensor. Cain mapped the flow of energy around him. It bloomed in his mind like a second sight.
What he saw made the first beads of cold sweat trail down his back — not from strain, but from trepidation.
Ragta had already been moving.
Beneath the battlefield, the earth had shifted — lines of energy reinforcing the soil itself.
Each line crystallized with precision, forming a huge defensive net beneath the earth.
All of Cain's explosives — disarmed and encased in crystals.
'I... I... I just need to do it.'
Cain's eyes dropped to the bloodied cores still clutched in his hands.
Heavy — beating weakly with giant vitality.
He had two seconds of magic left. No time for anything grand.
So he conjured two spells — small, fast, utility-based.
A Reshape spell to alter the structure of the cores, then a Telekinetic spell to fling them precisely where he needed.
These giants and titans weren't the only ones capable of devouring, after all.
Cain jammed the bloodied cores into his mouth, biting down hard enough to break the dense membrane that protected them.
A surge of heat and cold exploded across his tongue — fire tasting like burning diesel oil, clashing violently against the numbing freeze of ice.
It was like swallowing molten steel and frozen glass at the same time.
But he endured it.
Prana flooded his veins — raw, volatile, unstable.
It wasn't built for humans. Cain knew that too well.
Unlike magicules or spirit energies, prana devoured body mass with every spell cast, eating away at muscle and fat in exchange for power.
It wasn't sustainable, he didn't need sustainability — extra seconds was what he needed.
With a guttural breath, Cain forced the prana into his pistols.
The magic was crude, half-formed, leaking inefficiency from every pore — but it was enough.
He fired twice — just sounds and sparks.
A blank.
The shots boomed across the mist-thick battlefield — unsilenced, deafening, like small thunderclaps.
Ragta reacted instantly.
Without a word or wasted motion, he slammed his hands into the ground, summoning twin crystal pillars once again — this time denser, thicker, layered with deeper prana reinforcement.
Clearly readied in advance — he wasn't making the same mistake twice.
And then, through the broken mist, came the sound Cain had been waiting for.
Click. Click. Click.
The heavy, metallic rhythm of a rotating cannon building momentum.
The golemite had arrived.
And it wasn't coming quietly.