Sigrun Eide was starting to get angry, and that was not generally accounted to be a good thing. Sigrun was as free-thinking as the next girl, but being tied to a chair and thrown down a pit was not her kink, especially when done by a coward who wouldn’t even show themselves.
For Sigrun, as for many people, the present held a decided primacy over the past; thus, the exact circumstances of her being bound to the chair and thrown in the hole were, in her mind, quite secondary to getting out from the chair, and the hole, for that matter.
Hmmmmm. The hole, such as it was, was maybe two and a half or three meters deep, and there was a sort-of shelf about a meter up one side. It was almost as if her captor wanted her to be able to escape, but only just.
Sigrun was a very good jumper, even under circumstances of extremely low mobility such as these, so the first jump was pretty easy. The second and much higher jump took four tries and several minutes of blistering invective, but she finally made it, and still tied to the chair, no less.
She’d debouched from the hole onto an upper floor of the wreck they’d been exploring, and now that she had fewer immediate worries, she began to consider, not without a certain degree of concern, what might have happened to Emil.
Before Sigrun could wrest herself from the chair, or plunge too deeply into concern for her team-mate, a Giant appeared between one blink and the next. Well, this day just kept getting better.
There was no time to worry about how the Giant had appeared: all her time had to be spent defeating it. Displaying considerable dexterity, Sigrun flipped around, lashing out at the Giant with the legs of the chair she was still tied to.
The Giant was obviously not expecting such aggressiveness from its putative prey, so it hesitated, with predictably fatal consequences. It is never wise for an opponent of Sigrun Eide to hesitate.
Sigrun had faced Giants before, and she knew that, for all their strengths, they still had weaknesses. One of these weaknesses was a susceptibility to close-in knife work--if you got close enough in the right spot, it had trouble getting at you before you sliced it, but you had to be very close.
Sigrun had used her first attack to finish breaking free from the ropes holding her to the chair, but wrecking the chair in the process. While the Giant was still off-balance, she grabbed one of the chair’s legs, drawing her trusty knife with the other hand.
The Giant, while massive, proved to only have a few viable heads, so Sigrun made short work of most of them. After the Giant was down to one head, though, it began protecting that head fiercely. It took all of Sigrun’s cunning to finally force the Giant to expose its last head so that she could smash it with her club.
Sigrun allowed herself a few heavy breaths as she stood over the Giant’s corpse. The last breath, however, brought with it a faint scent of smoke. Was Emil at work? Sigrun dashed off to follow the scent...
