Arthur looked at the giant, who was almost passing out after getting its life drained by the vines.
He went towards it, jumped, and stopped at the giant’s shoulder. Then, Arthur placed both of his hands on the giant’s head and channeled his mana.
It was not a spell, but an attack that all mages knew. Almost impossible to do during a fight, as the enemy had to be standing still, and weak to not fight back.
The reason behind that attack was to channel the users inside the brain of the enemy to either get their memories, make them obey the caster, or just make them pass out.
Arthur wanted the giant to first pass out, as that would make doing the other two things way easier. Within 10 seconds, the giant passed out.
After that, a youth returned to the city, carrying a giant. It weighed a lot, but with the strength Arthur had, it was within his powers to lift that giant and carry it around.
The flying skill was of great use, and the people from the city instantly recognized the youth who were flying above the city with a giant.
“Isn’t that general Arthur? I heard he is a seven circle mage, and that he was the reason for our victory.”
“That is correct. My cousin is a soldier, and he told me everything. General Arthur even brought some soldiers back from the dead with his healing spells.”
“Incredible! I also heard he single-handedly defeated the strongest creature of the horde, that giant he is now carrying!”
Arthur heard all of that and could not help but to think that gossip and information spread quickly. The fight had just ended, yet most people knew what had happened already.
He encountered Louis along the way, so Arthur looked down and said, “can you find me a suitable place for experimentations with this giant?”
Louis was the general responsible for that area for quite some time, so he knew everything around the city, and also had a personal mansion big enough for Arthur to use in his studies.
“Follow me.” Louis said.
The place he was leading Arthur to was his personal villa in the Markhar city. A place where no one could enter except him, and as he was an important member in the army, the place was immense.
It was even bigger than the villa Arthur bought back in the dark lands.
“That building separated from the main one is where I do my personal training, but there is also an underground lab if you want to use. It is big enough for that giant to pass without problems.”
“Thanks, Louis.”
“No problem, brother. You are a key piece of our army now. And my friend.”
Louis waved his goodbyes and then entered inside the main building of his villa, presumably to rest after that intense fight against the beast horde.
Arthur went inside that separated building Louis had talked about moments earlier and looked for the underground laboratory.
It was there, and was so big the giant actually fit perfectly. Arthur thought it was a joke by Louis and that he would have to find a way to put that thing inside the lab, but it turned out it was the truth all along.
He did not know why Louis built everything so big, but would not complain, considering that fat had just made his life easier.
Inside the lab, he put the giant’s body on the floor after pushing some tables away.
“At least the tables aren’t the size of a giant, or else I would worry about the precedence of this place.”
Now that Arthur had a place to calmly study that giant, he sighed in relief. The procedures would not take that long, at least not memory scanning.
Arthur placed both of his hands on the giant’s head again, but now he aimed to scan the memories of that creature to see exactly what had happened to it.
Nothing occurred in the first five minutes of Arthur channeling his mana, but then images appeared inside his mind.
And it was, “the Bone Lord?”
Images that showed the Bone Lord arriving at a snowy continent, and that is where he saw the giants, which some were dead, and others alive and well.
The particularly giant Arthur had on his lab was alive, and even talked with the Bone Lord in some of its memories. The Bone Lord tried to conquer those giants, only to fail, as the giant lord was incredibly strong and almost killed the Bone Lord, sending him away from their continent.
Arthur knew the Bone Lord was not behind the incident, as he had killed him, so he kept checking the memories of that giant to see if there was anything of value.
Then he saw something that made his body tremble. Inside the snowy continent, there were a few people who were intruders, hiding in it, searching for something.
He recognized those people as the Doom Order, which worshiped the so-called demons, which were basically people from the Monlog bloodline.
George had said that the Monlog bloodline is the purest, but there were another type of similar giants who came after the Monlog, producing weaker bloodlines but that shared some of its powers.
The Monlog was basically the ancestral of all these ‘demons’, and George said it was not uncommon for weaker bloodline families to manipulate others from lower realms.
Arthur was almost sure one of these families was playing with the Doom Order, granting them some of these ‘demonic powers’, which was a way for them to take control of bodies and experiment with their avatars in that realm.
“Those people are sure bored to do something like that.”
Anyway, the strangest part was not the Doom Order itself, but three people that were being held captive by them.
The first one was Hiley, a woman who helped Arthur back in the palace, and the two of them had a somewhat romance.
As for the others, those were two people that Arthur got to know only for a moment, right before getting shot by that arrow and falling into the sea.
It was Aria, the girl he saved from the wolf before reaching Rento for the first time, the practitioner of the divine arts. And her brother Cedric was there too!
Arthur knew they had left to explore the world, just like Myria, but never he expected that something as bad as that would happen to them.
He kept scanning the memories, but found nothing. It was as if whoever got that giant erased that part of the memories in case someone got their hands on it.
The plans in Arthur’s mind had changed. He wanted to slowly end this beast invasion, and then build his own academy near Frostpeak to make sure his students would have a decent place to stay, and maybe someday reach the rank 1 mage status, but now?
There was no way he would let Hiley, Aria, and Cedric in the hands of those bastards. He had to save them, no matter the cost.
But how would he do that with all the problems he had to face?