Chapter 351 The Strongest Subordinate.
Other than the plant-type monster lord, the shortest route to the spider queen's chamber didn't have any other monsters.
The only hurdle they faced in their journey was coming across poisonous mushrooms and plants.
They didn't need to go around them as Elliot, who was immune to the poison of such things, devoured them. The act of consuming them not only helped him gain new types of poison and increased the amount of different kinds of poison in his poison sacks, but it also shortened the time they needed to reach the chambers.
Within three minutes, they reached their destination.
"What the heck is that?! It's too fucking tall!" Elliot exclaimed while pointing at the anomaly in front of him.
Freya replied, "It's the queen's strongest underling, Apex Hill Giant."
"This name suits well for someone his size," Zerrick added.
The one who was standing guard before the spider queen's chamber was the strongest monster lord in the unholy necropolis. It was extremely tall. It was sitting cross-legged, but its head touched the distant roof of this place, which was an artificial sky with white clouds. Its hands were massive, able to make a meat patty out of any man and beast who'd get on its nerves. Its legs were even longer and thicker than its hands, but they were also the hairiest part of its body.
Elliot took their thickness and sturdiness into account and thought that any human could use a single strand of its hair as a weapon.
Apex Hill Giant also noticed them. Its eyes stopped at Freya and showed a simple emotion. It was relieved. 'So she has chosen to go against the spider queen. Good! It's good. At least someone made the right decision. I can't do that even if I want to. My corrupt soul is a product of her creation. I can only follow the rules she had set on me and never break free from her. The day I do will be the day I die.'
"You shall not advance." Apex Hill Giant said after he saw them coming close to the spider queen's chamber.
They stopped after hearing it speak.
"If you take another step my way, I will be forced to kill you."
"Heed my warning and go away."
It warned them again.
"Is it talking to us?" Elliot asked while pointing at the giant, who was speaking in a language that he didn't understand.
Zerrick replied, "I think not, and even if he is, I bet he is spewing out some villainous lines that every other lowlife said right before dying under the hero's blade."
He hadn't learned the language of the Giants. After all, giants weren't native creatures of the Ash Grey World or the tiny worlds around it.
Elliot never had the opportunity to learn the giant race language, so he didn't understand its warning either.
"I think it's telling us to retreat and not advance further, or else we will enter its attacking range, and it will attack us even if it doesn't want to."
Freya somewhat understood what the Apex Hill Giant had said because she had some knowledge about its language.
<br/>Elliot and Zerrick understood that the spider queen was forcing the giant against its will to serve her.
Otherwise, if the giant were willingly serving her, he would have already taken action against them.
Elliot used the information-gathering power of his right eye and found out that the spider queen had imbued her evil in the Apex Hill Giant's very soul. Its soul was under her control. It was barely sane and alive. Whatever she orders, it could not stop itself from doing it. Whatever she had commanded it to do, it would keep on doing that until the end of time. There was no way to save it either.
Elliot ignored the giant's warning and walked ahead, so did Zerrick. Both of them had absolute confidence in their strength. They didn't care about the difference in height between them and the queen's strongest subordinate. Being huge never meant being strong.
Freya stood at her spot. She didn't intend to join the frontline as she knew that she would only burden the other two in the upcoming battle.
Whoosh!
When they reached sixteen meters away from it, the apex hill giant raised its arm. While bringing it up to the air, he clenched his hand into the shape of a fist. He brought his fist down at the two humanoids that were around the size of its forefinger.
Whoosh!
As its first went down at a mind-blowing speed, cracks appeared in the air.
Elliot and Zerrick didn't take a step away from their place.
Freya saw Zerrick standing with arms crossed.
The giant's fist reached him first as he saw a head taller than Elliot.
The expected scene of his head blasting like a watermelon didn't happen.
Instead, the giant's fist passed through him.
It was as if he didn't even exist.
Although his figure was still there and she could feel his presence too, the fist went through him.
When the fist was about to reach him, Elliot raised his hand to grab it.
Bam!
The gigantic fist crashed on his wide-open palm, and a resounding reverberation spread far and wide. The impact caused dust clouds to rise, which colored the air brownish and blocked Freya from seeing the aftermath.
When the dust cleared up, she saw a scene that shocked her to the core.
Elliot had blocked the gigantic fist with only one hand. His hand was an uncountable number of times shorter than the Apex, yet it wasn't budging from its spot even though the gigantic hand was pressing on it. Due to the pressure acting on him, his feet sank into the cracked ground below.
'How is this possible? Why can't I make him budge from his spot! He is so tiny, but even with using all my strength, I can't force him to take a step back. He, just what is the?!'
The giant used the power of its entire weight to break the bones of Elliot's hand and crush his body, but all its efforts remained futile.
"I will return the favor."
The hand which Elliot had reinforced with uncountable units of the essence of life pushed back, and in the blink of an eye, the giant felt as if a mountain had rammed into it at the speed of lightning.
As if it was an arrow released from the bow, the Apex Hill Giant's entire body backward and crashed on the golden gates with rose-like designs on them.
"Come Forth, Weapon Fort."
An instant after Elliot said those words, an intense amount of the units of the essence of life surged out of his body and charged above his head, shaping into the form of weapons. Their number increased from one to ten and from ten to so many that Freya could only find weapons in the surrounding area.
The shadow of the many weapons fell on everything beneath the sky. It makes one feel as if they were no escape. No matter what they do, they will fall under the might of the weapon fort.
The giant was not one to feel hopeless so soon, so it waved its limbs and smashed many weapons into shards.
However, instead of falling, these shards went behind the other weapons and rejoined into brand new weapons.
It took only three seconds for the shards to combine into an equal number of weapons that the Apex Hill Giant destroyed by whipping out its limbs.
"Rejoice, for I will now set you free from this miserable life," Elliot said as he snapped his finger, commanding the weapons hovering here to move in.
The weapons charged ahead and fell on it like torrential rain.
The first wave of weapons didn't leave a scratch on it. So did the second to the ninth one. After the tenth wave of weapons comprised around ten thousand sharp and pointy swords and spears rained down it, scratches appeared all over its skin. The next tens of thousands of weapons did their best to make those scratches become cuts. And the following weapons stabbed those cuts so many times that they became open wounds.
"AHHHHHHHH!"
The Apex Hill Giant let out a frustrated roar. It had destroyed so many weapons, but each time they would dramatically repair themselves and come back to have a piece of itself. There was no end to the endless swarm of weapons. Because there were too many of them, it couldn't even discern where its target stood.
It was getting stabbed by a hundred weapons every second, and in a couple of seconds, its open wound became deep wounds.
The cuts created by the weapons were deep enough for Elliot to sneak his poison into its poison.
Dozens of 5th and 6th level poison, some of which were variants that none have ever experienced went inside the Apex Hill Giant's body and started wrecking havoc!