Looming. That was the only word for it. It stood ahead of him, that terrible grin fixed to its grotesque mouth, and it loomed, a spectre of evil made flesh. He knew he would find it here, knew it would greet him with its hungry maw, and he came willingly. After all, that is the business of heroes. To walk blindly and willingly into the grip of doom, with no thought for safety or good sense.
As it stood before him, its taloned toes clicking maddeningly on the stones, he wondered why he wasn’t nervous. By all rights he should have been, for though he’d faced beasts and demons before, they had all been petty things compared to this monstrosity. It filled his entire world, blurring the horizon between heaven and earth, and to call it merely huge would be folly, for its immensity belied any comprehension in a four letter word. It was no matter. The monster would fall like the rest.
With a confidence little earned the hero pushed his spear into the ground, its point upright. It was a holy thing, the spear of Redhorn, and it gave him an unfair advantage. However, he would take no chances this day. He swung from behind his back a long tube of smooth metal, its back end displaying the fins of a rocket. Something to soften the beast before it lunged at him. Something to give him an easier target when he finally struck.
The hero then did something that baffled the monster. He turned his back on it and sat on the dirt, his legs crossed beneath him. The behemoth was not a thing endowed with a great measure of intelligence, but what little it had sung of hidden intent on seeing such a careless move. It roared with a sound fit to crack mountains and sunder kingdoms, seeking to intimidate the hero into some sort of action. But he remained still, his back turned. Fury rising within it, the beast bellowed and swung its long arms, tearing up the ground and casting it into the sea, but still the hero was still. A cold sweat began to form upon the monster’s brow as it raged on, until slowly the man with his rocket launcher and spear turned to face it, a fiendish smile twisting his handsome features.
He raised the metal tube to his shoulder when out of the corner of his eye he saw the tip of a tail longer than worlds swinging toward him. Terror finally gripping him his gaze flickered back to the monster ahead and there he saw only satisfaction in its eyes. It had outsmarted him.
The strike blasted the roguish smile from his face and cast him far to the east. When finally he landed he saw that he had fallen atop a mound of corpses, of fallen heroes, and as his eyes closed he wondered whether he should perhaps have been nervous after all.
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Tale of the Week 289: Behemoth - SUBMISSION THREAD
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