Bro, I'm not an Undead!

Chapter 1152: Fate of Giants! (2)



"Scaled Elder Jiggorrhax was the one who called back the Giants," Sause said, his face stone- like and his eyes shining.

At that moment, he and everyone following after him, had reached quite a massive mountain that rose up to the clouds, penetrating them easily even when it barely seemed to be reaching its limit. It was quite wide, spotting a girth of roughly four hundred kilometers in diameter. A set of large stairs, clearly built to accommodate Giants wound around the structure,

disappearing where it fed into the clouds.

Replicus narrowed his eyes and frowned.

Strange.

It took him and everyone else around him a second or two to notice but... this mountain had just appeared out of the blue. Its seamless introduction into their surroundings would have gone unnoticed if everyone here hadn't been expecting something extraordinarily unusual for obvious reasons.

Like before, Replicus didn't have to ask.

Sause already knew where his and the others' thoughts were winding around.

"This is the Sovereign's Peak. Some of our most skilled predecessors from before the navigated time - the First Grand War and beyond - created it and applied Creeds to it in order to forever hide it from those who didn't need to see it, ahaha," he explained. "Only when accompanied by a dragon, or Dragonsson - us Giants - can one see and interact with it. And as long as it stands, Edagon can never truly perish, you see."

Replicus was intrigued.

"Is that so? Dragonsson, huh?" he said.

He vaguely remembered that the Grinning Jester Fox, the guardian of the Labyrinth of the Yoke had called Sause something like this after the two - plus an unconscious Benzard - had exited the labyrinth back then.

As for the detail about the Sovereign's Peak, Replicus had been anxious about what exactly would become of Edagon if he and Caxellac kept fighting on the massive continent. The scale of the damage they caused, he was sure, would have levelled a landmass like Feinheath within the first minute or so. The continent wasn't nearly as dense with mana as Edagon.

Now, as he came to know, there was never a need to worry about destroying the whole damn continent in the first place... somehow.

Sause set to climb the first step on the Sovereign's Peak.

"I'm afraid there's no quicker way to get to the top. We have to climb, ahaha. Apart from the Eternal Drakkens, no entity has been able to fly up or warp to the top of this mountain. We pay our respects by either clawing our way up or climbing with the stairs. Follow," he said.

The journey was treacherously arduous.

Even Replicus, who dreaded what his flying Ju`wtte might do to the others, had to use the stairs, though, thankfully, it didn't cause any damage whatsoever to the Sovereign Peak. He did, however, have to walk a few dozen stairs behind the others.

They had climbed for two minutes in complete silence, when Replicus asked:

"Why did Jiggorrhax pull the dragons back? You seem convinced that there was no way you could lose. You said as much back when we met in the Temple of Unlusted Tears too." Sause chuckled.

"Right," he said. "Well, I suppose that much had first to do with the reason why the Giants decided to travel around in the first place. Humans and Sif realised belatedly, but our intentions weren't truly pure, or rather, they were mildly misguided. Back in those days, Elder Jiggorrhax, while rash and young, only about two thousand years old, did not desire to interact with us much. He said we were noisy and that deterred him from hearing what Suzamete desired of him. Thus, he left us to our own devices, allowing us to roam Aigas as we wished. He believed, as sons of the dragons we would never jeopardise Aigas' integrity. Well, until we did, ahaha."

"Some of us believed that to liberate Aigas, we, the next generation of the most loyal creations of the Deities, would need to rule over all else. Who could blame us, really? The Sif were busy giving offerings to trees and seas instead of playing the role of keepers. And humans, well, humans were being humans. Driven yet cruel. The idea to take the helm on Feinheath and Opungale was born after seeing the great division between humans, as opposed to how the Sif united under the High Family."

Replicus nodded sombrely.

"Well, I feel like that's a bit harsh," Aurolio said with a chuckle. "Cruel? Power is an order even the Deities can't monopolise. As a result, they can't control the systems it creates, can they? Among humans, it just happens to breed some rather... selfish ideals. I bet your round trip to Maqi must have taught you a lot of that."

Replicus couldn't say he disagreed. Perhaps he was a little shallow in his understanding of how the Sif worked, but he knew humans. It wasn't exactly as though humans chose to be driven. The inevitability of there being those that were stronger than others formed the systems that reigned over not just the humans, but the beasts.

Sause gave Aurolio a sharp look.

"I don't disagree. I liked how driven the humans were. Many fascinating... enlightening, philosophies were born because of that. I especially enjoyed how, amidst the shallow 'Might makes right because that is the natural order' type of opinions, there were more nuanced views, like Fulgardt's, for instance."

"Fulgardt's?" Replicus asked.

"Yeah. Fulgardt's," Benzard, who had been eerily quiet, finally spoke. "When we met" - he looked at Replicus - "I believed he was a simple man who had believed that strength was everything, not bringing anything else in his sights, but upon understanding his ideal, I found a nasty bit of irony."

"Fulgardt gathered strength because he didn't think there was such thing as freedom. He didn't believe the Deities were free either. He believed that as one gained strength, they gained greater privileges when it came to selecting who and what purpose they would serve in the grand, set scheme of reality. He believed in this mysterious figure known as the Wanderer Who Seeds, a being he boasted was above even the Deities, above all reality. He claimed his power came from him. He hated the three Deities because he believed them, and every other kind there is, to be deluded, attempting to steal the role of the Wanderer of Seeds."

Sause laughed.

"Well read," he complimented Benzard. "The man also believed that if given a chance to step into the role of Deity, he would decline, ahaha. He told me this before I even taught him how to breach through to a Divine State, in fact. Headstrong man, that Fulgardt."

Replicus and Aurolio were thunderstruck and Sause caught onto it.

"Yes," he answered before they could ask. "I was indeed the one who turned Fulgardt into the Immoral. Of course, to do that, I had to stay behind after Elder Jiggorrhax called us all back. I rebelled. And of course - having stalled enough - we, the Giants - were called back to be scolded and then fed to a young Jerthrax."