Arthur presses on alone, and soon he meets a widow.  He can tell she’s a widow because she’s on her knees in front of a freshly-dug grave, wringing her hands and sobbing for her dead husband.

“What’s the matter, old woman?” asks Arthur.  “I mean, it’s pretty obvious what the general shape of it is that’s troubling you, but do you want to talk about it?”

“Shh!” says the widow, shushing him, even though she was just making a racket sobbing a moment earlier.  “There’s a monster nearby, if he hears you he’ll eat us both.  You poor man, stumbling in at random to this cursed place. Surely you’ll die here, as so many have.  Not even if you had fifty soldiers could you survive.  We will all die, just as the Duchess of Brittany died: slowly and painfully and it’ll be like a scene from Saw.”

“Listen, lady, and I mean no disrespect, but I’m here from Camelot.  I’m part of King Arthur’s court, and we don’t cotton to child-killing, duchess-eating giants,” Arthur says.  “I’ve come to try to talk to the giant, get him to stop with his fiendish ways, and go peacefully.”

The widow laughs hollowly.  “Peacefully?  You waste your time, knight.  The only thing in Camelot the giant would care about is Queen Guenever, and then only because he’d like to rape, torture, murder, and eat her.  He’s killed more than a dozen messengers and couriers trying to talk him into leaving the area, and right now he’s probably wearing his jeweled coat that we gave him last Christmas as a present in hopes it would inspire him to stop murdering and eating people, which it didn’t.”

Arthur says that’s as may be, but he’ll nevertheless try to talk to the giant, and figure out how to deal with him.

The widow shrugs and points over her shoulder, saying the giant was just on the other side of that rise.

So Arthur crests the hill and looks down the other side and sees, sure enough, the giant.  The giant is sitting at a bonfire, gnawing on something, wearing nothing but matted hair and dirt.  Three maidens, who may as well have been wearing t-shirts with I AM A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS printed on them, have been tasked with the thankless job of cooking the giant’s supper: a dozen birds cooked on skewers, like shish-kebab.

Then Arthur looks more closely and sees that no, those aren’t birds, those are babies, and his “talk to the giant” plan goes out the window right then and there.

“Death!” he shouts.  “Death and shame and the devil take you!”

“Wot?”

“Why would you do that?  Why would you kill and eat babies and rape my cousin’s wife to death and argh I can’t even!  Get up and fill your hand, for I’ve come to kill you!”  Arthur brandishes Excalibur.

The giant gets up, puts on zero pairs of pants, grabs his big club, and clocks Arthur in the head.

“You’re much faster than you look,” says Arthur, or tries to, blood welling out of his mouth and all.  But Arthur’s no slouch, he’s got a +1 sword, and he disembowels the giant right quick.  Probably he thinks the fight is over at that point.

But no!  This giant just gets angrier and angrier, the more intestines he’s got spilling out!  He tosses his club aside, grabs Arthur, and starts trying to rip him apart!  Arthur and the giant are grappling and we all know how terrible the grappling rules are in Dungeons & Dragons, Arthur’s pretty well screwed by the giant’s superior strength.

The three damsels in distress kneel and pray for someone to help Arthur — God, Jesus Christ, Sir Kay, anyone — and Arthur rolls with the giant up over the crest of the hill, down the other side, and back up again to the shrine of St. Michael.

Bedivere and Kay are still sitting there, chilling out, drinking coffee from thermoses and wondering what the heck Arthur is up to, when boom, the king rolls in, along with a disemboweled giant who’s trying to tear the king to pieces.  Naturally they leap up! Arthur is all “Kay Kay kill this guy Kay” and Kay pulls out his sword and hacks the giant’s head off at the neck, which is finally enough to get the giant to stop moving.

Afterwards Arthur puts the giant’s head on a pike and sends it to his cousin the Duke of Brittany, and has Bedivere go and fetch Excalibur and Arthur’s shield from where he dropped them when the giant grabbed him, and Kay goes looking for damsels to free and finds the giant’s smock and club, which he gives to Arthur as trophies (“See how big that smock is?  I fought a giant who wasn’t even wearing that smock!”) and also some treasure.  Kay helps himself to the treasure.

Meanwhile Arthur gets a messenger in.  Messenger is from King Bors’s best general (Bors is still king of France).  Apparently while Arthur was dicking around with giant-killing, the Roman Empire finally arrived.  They invaded Burgundy and just burned everything.  “Get down here already,” is the gist of the message.