Antaeus

Antaeus gave Goliath a side-eyed look that showed he was less than appreciative of his attitude, but took his displeasure no further than that, instead taking the opportunity to continue the joke. "Well, if you youngins are so eager to hear my story..."

Paul Bunyan was the one to butt in this time. "God, you two are unbearable!" He turned to me and spoke, "I know it might be hard to understand, being mortal and all, but once you get past a couple centuries, age doesn't really matter all that much. Most of the giants recognize that, but seeing as these two have nothing else going for them, Goliath and Antaeus spend about ninety percent of their time rubbing their high and mighty ancient status in everyone's faces."

"Oh I'm sorry, do you and John want to go sit at the kiddie table with Jolly Green and that 'Jack and the Beanstalk' guy?" Goliath chimed in.

"If it means not having to listen to you two? Yes!" John Henry and Paul Bunyan answered in unison.

I was beginning to worry this argument would take up the rest of our time when the Oni of Rashomon (who had thus far been occupied with the appetizer plate) piped up demanding Antaeus just get on with his story. The rest of the giants obliged.

"Alright, I won't beat around the bush," Antaeus began. "Let's just get right into the Hercules...Herakles...Hercle...whatever story! At the time, I was living in what I think you guys call 'Libya' these days. I was a professional wrestler, but I had this sorta side gig going on at the time. My house was right next to pretty much the only road through the area, so I'd challenge passersby to wrestling matches. Winner forks over like, half a drachma. I used the proceeds from it to fund some remodeling work I was doing on my dad, Poseidon's, temple."

I started, "Really? I heard that-"

"That I killed everyone I beat and used their skulls as roof tiles? Yeah, yeah. Stories tend to get exaggerated when they've been told for a few thousand years. Anyway, one day Hercules comes along. He's on his tenth, eleventh maybe, labor at this point, so I've heard of him, but I'm not gonna wuss out just 'cause someone might give me an actual fight for once. So I challenge him to a match, same as anyone else, and he sure did give me an actual fight. I'm not the biggest fan of the guy, but even I'll admit he's good. And not just strength either. Speed, skill, flexibility, aggression, he's got it all. I can't for the life of me take this guy down. Fortunately, he can't do much to me either. My mom's the Earth, so as long as I've got even a pinky toe touching the ground, I'm a fair bit more than Herc can handle. Eventually though, he manages to slip by me. He swings around and lifts one of my legs in the air...here's where I messed up: he goes to sweep the other leg out from under me, and to avoid that happening, I jump over his foot. For a brief second, I was off the ground, but that was all he needed. Herc jumped in under me, cinched his grip up, lifted, and dumped me on my head. That was that. Walked off and left me lying there, didn't even stay long enough to collect his half-drachma."

"Did you ever meet him again?" I asked.

"No, though I wish I had. The man owes me about half a century's worth of physical therapy bills for the damage that throw did!"

Story Source: Wikipedia

Author's Note: I've always thought Antaeus was pretty cool (minus the whole killing people and taking their skulls thing). Being a fighter, invincibility whilst touching the ground sounds like a pretty awesome ability to have. In the original story, as Hercules was either heading to or from his eleventh labor (depending on the telling) he encounters Antaeus, the giant son of Gaia and Poseidon who has been challenging travelers to wrestling matches and using their skulls to decorate a temple to his father. Hercules wrestles with Antaeus and struggles initially, but after trying to throw and pin Antaeus and realizing that he gets stronger the closer he is to the ground, Hercules instead lifts him up in a bear hug and crushes him to death.

Having wrestled plenty myself, I found it kind of unbelievable that Hercules couldn't throw Antaeus, but could achieve a strong enough position to lift and crush him. With this in mind I elected to have Antaeus taken off the ground through a combination of a much higher-percentage takedown attempt (seen in GIF) and his own slip-up defending it. Besides that, the only other major change I made to the story was having the whole temple of skulls thing be an embellishment (I don't think he'd get invited to the convention if he actually did that).