Hangman and his cousins searched the surrounding jungle for any sign of danger, but danger lurked all around them.

  The sun rose above the high canopy and gave the travelers a clear view of the jungle around them.

  The creatures Hangman could see all belonged to dangerous species, but that was nothing compared to what the men could hear.

  His ears traced the movements of dozens of different creatures of many kinds. Some came toward the party drawn by the smell of blood.

  Sweat stung all the cuts and scratches covering every inch of Hangman’s skin. He didn’t wipe the blood away. It protected him from his own sweat.

  Butcher led the way through miles of dense jungle until the men got to a steep ravine with a stream running through the bottom.

  The party divided into three groups and took turns washing the blood off in the water while their relatives stood guard.

  Hangman handed around the leaf paste. He didn’t get a chance to use it while he was standing guard.

  His group went to the stream last. He gritted his teeth to stop himself from flinching when he wiped the blood off. Then he had to pull out the darts buried in his arms and legs.

  Chaos came over to him. “Stand still, little brother. Let me do it.”

  Hangman shut his eyes and sent his mind somewhere else while Chaos pulled the darts out of Hangman’s back. Chaos splashed water on the wounds and then smeared leaf paste on them.

  Hangman pretended not to notice Chaos spreading the paste on all of Hangman’s other wounds. Hangman could have done that himself, but he let his cousin do it for him.

  Godless men didn’t show affection very often. They didn’t have time and now wasn’t the time.

  None of Hangman’s relatives mentioned him killing that Crusher. He could accept this little show of care as a token of his cousins’ appreciation for saving all their lives.

  Hangman had been getting used to this kind of thing ever since he initiated as a man of the Godless Clan. He would have to be blind not to notice how rarely any of the men did anything like this for each other.

  They only did it when they wanted to acknowledge some favor or exceptional act one of them performed for the others.

  They did it to Hangman often, but only because he seemed to always be in the right place at the right time to bail them out of situations like this.

  Chaos swiveled in front of him and grinned when he wiped the last of the paste on Hangman’s face. “At least you won’t get any uglier,” Chaos told him.

  Hangman snorted. “Maybe I should. Then I could scare the monsters to death just by looking at them. I wouldn’t have to fight them.”

  Chaos laughed. He was only a few years older than Hangman. They had grown up together, fought together, and shared hardship and danger together.

  Chaos’s laughter disturbed Butcher. “We can move out if you’re done playing around,” he snapped. “We need to put some distance between us and this blood.”

  The two cousins didn’t argue. They fell in line together and the group started climbing out of the ravine.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  They moved a lot faster now and covered the miles to get as far away as possible from their previous camp.

  The party camped at sundown the next day in a different clearing many miles from where they started.

  Boxer, Banjo, and Chaos unpacked the dried Gorlock meat they brought with them. The men shared it between them and sat around the fire to eat it.

  Butcher pulled out his picture sheets again. Hangman didn’t look at them. He had already studied them as closely as he needed to. He remembered every detail of the strange weapons and the unknown mountain range in the background.

  Alien broke the silence. “We can’t go any further west without running into Renegade patrols.”

  “We’ll carry out our raid in the morning,” Butcher decided. “We’ll forge as deeply into their territory as we can and try to get to the top of the Jagged Points. Then we’ll see what we need to do.”

  No one answered. Hangman could think of a lot of reasons to go after these weapons. He could think of just as many reasons not to, but no one asked his opinion.

  Cross stayed close to him for most of the day and sat near him that night. Hangman didn’t comment on it.

  Cross’s injured leg didn’t slow him down on the journey here, so it must not have been severe.

  The swelling in his face seemed to be getting worse, though. Hangman gathered more leaves, made more paste, and put it on the cuts that night before the men went to sleep.

  “Put some of the paste on your own face,” Boxer called across the fire. “See it helps anything.”

  “No amount of paste will make you smarter,” Hangman returned. “Unless you put the paste on your mouth and it seals up. That would heal what’s really wrong with you.”

  Dead silence answered him. Not many people had the nerve to tease Hangman about his appearance anymore. He didn’t take it lightly and he retaliated in spades if anyone dared.

  Boxer was a big guy, but he had a blundering, sloppy way of doing everything. He had no iron in him the way Viking did.

  Boxer wore his hair tied back into a bunch behind his head. Hangman couldn’t explain why, but this style made Boxer look even more bumbling, idiotic, and ineffectual than he otherwise would have.

  Boxer stumbled through life by virtue of being Butcher’s oldest son. That was about the best thing Hangman could think to say about the guy.

  Butcher assigned the men to another three shifts to stand watch that night. He put Hangman on the first watch with Boxer, Banjo, and Shadow.

  Boxer didn’t make any more comments about Hangman’s face. Boxer was the only man stupid enough to try it anymore.

  He was too stupid even to get the message to keep his mouth shut, but that was fine with Hangman.

  He caught Boxer giving him side glances before immediately looking away. Boxer wouldn’t have been able to take down that Crusher—not from that distance.

  Hangman could think of a lot of things he did since his initiation that Boxer wouldn’t have been able to do.

  That could be the reason Boxer kept trying to needle Hangman. Hangman had noticed a correlation between his own actions to protect his relatives and Boxer’s insulting comments.

  Boxer obviously didn’t like that the other men thought so highly of Hangman even though he was so much younger than everyone else.

  Hangman put the subject out of his mind, but he already knew Boxer would do it again the next time Hangman did something, especially something that saved Boxer.

  Shadow took charge of the first watch and assigned the three younger men to different sides of the camp as usual.

  It wasn’t usual for him to post Hangman on the west side of the camp—the side the Renegade Clan would attack from if they did attack the Godless camp.

  It would have been unheard of for anyone to post such a young man in the most dangerous position, but no one questioned Shadow’s decision.

  Hangman no longer considered this anything unusual anymore. Shadow and Butcher did things like this to him all the time nowadays. It had become normal for them to treat him the same way they would have treated a man decades older than he was now.

  Shadow was too smart and knew his son too well to post Boxer anywhere other than on the farthest opposite eastern side of the camp—as far away from Hangman as it was possible to put him.

  Hangman caught Banjo giving them all side looks, too, but he stayed out of it. Banjo followed his brother Chaos’s example by keeping quiet most of the time.

  If anything, Banjo became even more silently watchful than either Fang or Chaos, but no one could accuse Banjo of bumbling, dullness, or lacking in iron.

  He and Chaos were cut from the same cloth as their oldest brother Alien. Hangman really couldn’t comprehend how the three of them descended from such a sloping, brainless father.

  The four men patrolled the camp, but nothing happened until the watch changed. Viking woke up Cross, Butcher, and Feather.

  Hangman stretched out in Cross’s place by the fire, shut his eyes, and fell into an exhausted sleep. The pain and fatigue of the past two days caught up with him.

  He didn’t wake up until daylight broke through the canopy.

  ? 2024 by Theo Mann

  I post new chapters of the Rise of the Giants series on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday PST.

  Don't want to wait to read the rest of the book? You can purchase the completed book, the whole The Rise of the Giants

  Series, and the rest of Theo ’Manns work at Theo Mann’s Amazon Author Page.

  Read Rise of the Giants: Blood Enemies for free!

  Get these episodes delivered to your inbox before anyone else sees them. Find out how on Patreon at .

  Thank you for reading and thank you for your support!