A large muscular man woke up naked with a gasp, sitting up right as ash fell off him. He began to cough heavily as he had inhaled some of the ash in his gasp. He looked around him. He was in a shallow stony cave surrounded by burnt, smoldering corpses and smoke, only making his cough worse.

He began to heave as his body tried to vomit as it dawned on him that the ash he had inhaled was the burnt people he found around him, but he had nothing in his stomach to purge.

“Are you unwell?” a voice crackled to him.

Once he stopped heaving, he looked up to see a creature in front of him. This creature was like a mix between a snake and an eel, about half of a meter in length, round, and slimy. It had the head of a snake with two blue lines running down the length of its body that seemed to dimly glow. He looked around and there weren’t any other living things in this cave. As he looked back at the snake-eel, he noticed it making eye contact with him.

“Yesss, you. You should be fully recovered.” the voice crackled again.

It sounded like a snap of an electric arc, but repeatedly like something making contact with a power line.

“What are you? How are you speaking to me?” the man asked the creature.

“I am your Familiar. I manifested from you, so we can share thoughts with one another. We should leave this place. The creature that did this left, chasing others a while ago, but I can’t tell if or when it will come back.”

“Alright, we can table this for now. Do you know where we should go?” the man asked between coughs.

“No” the creature crackled back.

“I guess we should go take a look then.”

The man stepped out of the cave and looked around. The trees immediately around the cave were cinders and fire was spreading to the woods around him. The air was hot and thick with smoke and his cough continued. There was then a roar from within the woods.

“Well, we aren’t going that way.” The man coughed out. “Come on.”

He extended his arm out to the snake-eel to offer it a ride.

“You’re not going to bite me if I carry you, are you?”

“Yesss,” it crackled as it bit his open palm.

“What the hell!” the man said, startled.

The bite only hurt as it punctured the man’s skin. The snake-eel seemed to slither its way into the bite.

“What did you just do?”

“Did you not offer to carry me? I merged with you. Now you may carry me.”

“That isn’t what I expected. I meant that you could ride on me, not inside of me.”

“As your Familiar, this is the easiest way for you to carry me. It will also protect me from the fire and if you are attacked.”

“At least buy me dinner first, or maybe start with your name.” The man said to the creature.

“I don’t have one,” its voice crackled back inside of his head.

“Let’s call you Am then. You have quite a bite,” the man said and began running.

It wasn’t too long before the man collapsed while running, coughing and gasping for air. The woods were all a blaze around him and the air was thick with smoke. His lungs felt like they were on fire and like he couldn’t catch a breath. He was suffocating from smoke inhalation!

‘This isn’t good!’ He thought, his vision getting blurry as he laid there and coughed.

His vision went dark and his body gave out. Next thing he knew his eyes were wide open and he gasped for air, inhaling a bunch of smoke again and starting his coughing fit all over.

‘What was that?’

“I can’t wait for the fires to subside, that beast is still out there, you’ll have to keep moving,” Am crackled.

“Right,” the man coughed out.

“Don’t speak, you’ll just breathe more in. Just think instead.”

“Like this?” the man thought?

“Yesss.”

The man began crawling through the woods, trying to stay low where there was less smoke and heat. He finally made it to the edge of the woods and into the tall grass which the fire hadn’t spread to yet. Then he heard a loud whoosh and flapping sound as a shadow passed over him. He looked up to see a massive beast. A Wyvern! An honest to god Wyvern! He couldn’t believe it.

It began to circle. Had it spotted him? Was this the beast Am was talking about? It must be! Then from nowhere, several arcs of lightning struck the great beast with loud cracks of thunder. Not from the sky though, it was a clear day if you disregarded the plumes of smoke coming from the blazing woods. No, it came from the ground. The Wyvern roared from the pain. The man poked his head up in what would be thigh high grass for him and he saw them, a group of what appeared to be six Giants! They were about three meters tall and armored with plate mail of various colors. One had copper colored armor, four had bronze, and one had gold. All had sheathed longswords on their hips. To the man, they would be completely unwieldy. On their left arms, they had kite shields with some kind of sigil the man couldn’t make out from this distance. To him, they’d have been the size of tower shields.

‘Giant knights?’ He thought to himself.

He watched as three of them, two of the bronze and the one copper, held their arms back like they were preparing to throw javelins. Electricity arced from their hands as they did so, then they threw their arms forward and lightning arced from them to the Wyvern. It roared over the thunder as the bolts impacted the Wyvern and it dropped from the sky.

All of the knights drew their swords and rushed over to where the Wyvern had fallen. Each stride they took shook the ground and the plate mail klanked like gongs being rung. With the length of their legs, they made it to the Wyvern just as it was getting to its feet. The gold knight threw another booming lightning bolt at it as it turned to them, hitting it in the head dazing it. Three of the bronze knights thrust their great swords into its chest in unison, as another of the bronze knights swung at its ankle, and the final copper knight tackled the Wyvern's tail just above the spined end with his shield and began hacking at its tail.

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This squad was trained well. One was focused on disorienting the beast, while two disabled its mobility and defense, and the rest dealt mortal wounds to it. They weren’t messing around and seemed practiced in their movements and timing.

It wasn’t long before the Wyvern collapsed dead on the ground. Its right foot was cut off, along with the end of its tail, and a large pool of blood was rapidly growing from multiple chest wounds. Then dark smoke began to rise from it and seemed to gather into something tied to the waste of the gold knight. The Wyvern seemed to deflate down, leaving behind its scaly skin, bones, spines, talons, and teeth.

“What in the world was THAT?”

“It appears that they slew the beast.” Am crackled.

The man stood up and began walking over to the knights, completely forgetting about his nakedness, as they began breaking down what remained of the Wyvern’s corpse. It took him a while to get close enough to call to them, after all, he wasn’t three meters tall like they were and his strides were less than half of theirs.

When he was finally close enough, he called out to them.

“Hey there! Thank you for dealing with that beast. If it wasn’t for you, I think I’d be its dinner.”

The squad of Giant knights turned to look at him.

“Look! This nature fucker must have gotten caught with his pants down. He doesn’t have a scrap of clothing on him. Don’t let him expose our position. Take care of him.”

“With pleasure,” the copper one breaking off tail spines said as he got up, a spine still in his shield hand.

“Shit!” the man said as he realized they weren’t here to save anyone. They were just here for the Wyvern.

“Did the big bad Wyvern smoke you out little elf?” the approaching copper knight taunted, holding back his sword arm as it began to crackle. The knight threw the lightning bolt with a thunderous boom at the man and hit him directly in the chest before he had a chance to even react to the approaching knight.

The man looked more surprised than shocked. Besides a tingling at the point where the lightning bolt connected with his chest, there was no pain, no burning, nothing. He thought that had been it, that he was going to die, but the bolt didn’t even phase him.

The knight stood there, as stunned as the man.

“You need to fight,” Am crackled in his head.

“What in the name of the Astral?” the knight exclaimed.

“You didn’t charge it enough,” one of the bronze knights shouted to him. “The shorter the charge, the less it does. Do we really need to send you back to training?”

The knight held back his hand again and began to charge another lightning bolt. The man let out a battle cry as he began charging at the Giant knight which startled it and caused it to drop the Wyvern spine, as he readied his shield. After charging the lightning bolt for a few seconds, he hurled it with a crack of thunder at the charging man who was still about a meter from him. Again, the lightning bolt didn’t appear to do anything to him which startled the Giant even further. The knight drew his sword and stepped back from the charging wild man and his foot caught and he fell backwards. The man grabbed the dropped Wyvern spine and leaped to try to wedge it in the plate mail between the helmet and the chest plate. He slowed as the Giant thrust his sword through his torso, but was still able to stab the knight in the process.

Sadly, the man had lost too much momentum when he was skewered by the knight and the Wyvern spine only slightly penetrated the base of the neck. The knight grabbed the spine, not letting it penetrate any deeper.

“Crazy elf! Die for your rebelliousness!” the knight shouted in the man’s face.

Things were going dark again, when Am’s voice crackled through. “Use the electricity. Kill him.”

The man envisioned energy flowing through his hands, using the spine as a conduit into the knight and past all of the armor plating. In that moment, all of the stored energy from both lightning bolts he was hit with, along with a little extra was sent into the base of the Giant knight’s neck. The knight convulsed violently as the electricity not only struck him, but created a circuit with the sword stabbed into the man and continued electrocuting the knight with the full force of the charge like an animal stuck to a high voltage electric fence. The knight’s flesh began to burn in the armor and smoke began to rise out of all gaps in the armor. The air began to smell of burnt hair and flesh.

After a moment, one of the other knights threw a Wyvern bone and knocked the man off of the knight, breaking the circuit.

Am crackled to the man as he laid there. “Do you wish to live now?”

“Yes.” He replied with his dying breath.

One of the bronze knights cautiously approached the skewered man while the others investigated the corpse of their fallen comrade. He lightly kicked the sword, testing to see if he too would be shocked from the contact. When he wasn’t, he apprehensively grabbed the hilt of the sword and pulled it out of the man’s torso. Now that he was closer, he also noticed that the naked man wasn’t actually an elf.

“Hey! This one doesn’t have pointy ears. It’s got ears like ours. He’s almost like a halfling of one of our kind.” The knight shouted to the others.

As the knight was distracted, the hole in the man’s torso closed with a crackle of electricity and the man sat upright with a sudden gasp of air. The knight just about jumped out of his skin and skidded back, not sure what to think of the moments ago, dead man. All of them had swords drawn and ready to put the man back down.

“What are you, creature?” The gold knight asked.

Not exactly understanding what was going on, but noticing five Giant knights with swords drawn around him and one dead one on the ground.

“I thought I was dead there.” The man said bemused.

“You were. You were skewered like a wild boar.”

The man, remembering being stabbed in a gambit to fight one of the knights, looked down to where there should have been a sword. There was nothing. Not even a mark. It was like he was never stabbed to begin with.

The man got to his feet, the knights tensing, readying to attack again.

“I don’t know what is happening. I’m a Human, like all of the other dead in this field and in the woods.”

“What is a Human? We don’t know of your kind. You appear to be halflings of our people.”

“Who are your people?”

“We are the Giants, the strongest of the races. How do you not know of the Giants?”

“Like I said, I’m Human. I’ve never known Elves to be real. We’ve had Giants before, but that is usually just a really tall person.”

“Do all, Humans,” the Giant tried the word, “ignore death so brazenly? Yorm, go check some of those other corpses!”

One of the bronze knights rushed to check some of the nearby corpses while the other knights began looking around while keeping their swords readied at the man. They were wondering if they were about to deal with a horde of these new creatures.

“No, not that I’m aware of,” the man responded. “I really did just die then,” he thought to himself.

“Yesss, you did and I resurrected you.” Am crackled in his head.

“No sir,” the bronze knight named Yorm yelled over to the group. “These seem to be remaining dead and they aren’t Elves either. They must be more halflings… I mean Humans.”

“By Astral! It must be a rapture.” The gold knight said to himself. “Is your race a warrior race? How long ago did you arrive here?”

“We have some warriors, but many are not. I was coming to thank you for slaying that beast when you attacked me. As for arriving, I woke up in a cave surrounded by corpses and being hunted by that Wyvern. I don’t remember beyond that.”

“I apologize for that. We aren’t currently on friendly terms with the Elves and mistook you for one. That being said, we will need to bring you back with us. Men, we need to bring word of this to Sol. There are most likely more of these Humans arriving. We are in rapture protocol now! Capture any additional living Humans that we find on our way back. Leave the dead to the beasts, we don’t have time for them.”

Two of the bronze knights sheathed their swords as they moved in to restrain the man.

“What is your name Human?”

“My name?”

“Yes. What others of your kind call you.”

“Vol. Call me Vol.”

“Come with us Vol. We have questions about your people. And someone give this Human some clothes from the dead. They won’t need it anymore.”