Chapter 272 - 263 — No Other Door I

Chapter 272: Chapter 263 — No Other Door I

The red light reached Baldwin’s boot and did not stop there.

It came up around him out of the cracks, and it did not burn anything or throw light on anybody’s face. It gathered, and it settled, and the man standing in the middle of it stopped looking tired.

That was all. His shoulders came back a fraction. The sword came up off the ground into a guard.

Then he moved, and the ground he crossed did not match the movement James’s eyes had made of it.

Ronan got the shield across because Ronan always got the shield across, braced for a version of the impact he had already survived four times.

He went backward two meters and his damaged arm folded almost flat against his own chest, and he only stayed upright because Finn was behind him.

Finn came into the opening Baldwin’s commitment had made — the same opening that had been there twenty seconds ago, the same one that had worked — and Baldwin recovered out of the strike faster than he had recovered from anything all day, and the counter was already turning toward Finn while Finn’s second axe was still coming round.

Finn got out of it by dropping his weight and losing his footing on purpose.

Raymond came in from the other side with the angle he had used in the duel, the one that had put his brother down on a knee, and he executed it correctly.

Baldwin corrected mid-commitment and drove him three paces back.

Raymond stood there for half a second with his sword out of position and stared at the man in front of him, because that exchange had worked forty minutes ago and it had not just failed, it had failed as though he had never learned anything at all.

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** HE GOT FASTER

**[user88317]:** ?????

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** RONAN BACK

**[ZeroFan]:** WHAT HAPPENED

**[FrontierWife]:** raymond tried the same counter

**[GalwayGoblin]:** MOVE MOVE MOVE

**[MOD]:** Slow mode enabled.

---

"Same as before!" James shouted. "Same pattern, don’t invent anything — Maeve!"

She had it before he finished.

[HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]

Onto the wound above the hip, the one Raymond had opened in the duel and the four of them had spent ten minutes feeding.

Ronan got the shield into Baldwin’s line and made him bring the sword across to deal with it. Finn came round the far side and hit the brand. Cillian put a short arc into the same place, careful, nothing like the thing that had put Kargan on a knee.

[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]

[CILLIAN — MANA STRAIN CRITICAL]

Raymond attacked while Baldwin was correcting, and James put a Necro Blast through the gap the correction opened.

[NECRO BLAST — MANA COST: 60]

[PRINCE BALDWIN — HP: 35,200 → 31,900]

Baldwin’s hand went to the wound.

It was the first time all fight he had touched himself where somebody had hit him, and James saw it, and so did Finn.

Then Baldwin came through the middle of them before they could build another one.

He caught Raymond in the recovery and put him down again, hard, and Ronan stepped in to stop the follow-up and took it through the ruined arm and made a sound.

Maeve’s light went to Ronan.

Which took it off Finn, and Baldwin was already turning — not toward the man, toward the *absence*, because he had spent an hour learning that the light going one way meant somebody had just stopped being covered.

Finn got the axes up. It was not enough and Maeve had to spend again to keep his ribs closed.

James raised what he needed and nothing more.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — MANA COST: 80]

One went straight at Baldwin’s eyes. One went wide and stood.

Baldwin destroyed the first without meaningfully slowing, because he had watched James do this for an hour and had stopped finding it interesting.

James pulled Durendal back and looked at the sword in his hand.

It was S-rank. It had gone through a Crown captain’s plate and an Orc Chief’s shoulder joint and it had been the best weapon on any battlefield he had ever stood on.

It was not going to be enough.

---

He put Durendal away and reached into his inventory for the other thing.

[AUTHORITY RELEASE ACTIVATED]

[TARGET: AZRAEL’S BROKEN SCYTHE]

[DURATION: 30 MINUTES]

The snapped haft came out of storage looking like exactly what it was, and then the missing blade began building itself out of the air above the break — black metal drawn out of nothing, bone-white cracks running through it, the curve completing in smoke and ash and cold light.

The temperature around James dropped hard enough that the mud at his feet stiffened.

Every soldier within twenty meters who was still alive backed away from him.

James went at Baldwin with it.

Baldwin caught the strike. He was expecting a weapon, and a weapon is what met his sword, and the physical shock of it travelled up both their arms exactly the way physical shocks do.

Then the red light where the scythe had touched it came apart.

Not dimmed. Not absorbed. It recoiled off the point of contact and broke away in strands, peeling back from Baldwin’s arm and shoulder for a full second before it crawled back and re-settled.

James saw it happen.

He did not know what the red light was. He did not know its name, or where it came from, or what it had cost the man wearing it. What he knew, standing in the mud with the cold running down the haft into his hands, was that whatever it was, *this* touched it.

Baldwin saw it too.

His whole priority reordered in front of them. He stopped working around James toward Raymond, stopped managing the formation, and came straight through it at the necromancer with the black weapon.

"He’s coming for you—"

"Good," James said.

—

Ronan met the rush and was driven sideways off his own feet.

Finn hit Baldwin while the sword was occupied with getting Ronan out of the way. Raymond came from the opposite flank and made him turn.

"Recovery’s left!" Maeve, from her knees. "He’s going left—"

James did not jump behind him.

[GRAVE STEP — MANA COST: 120]

He went to where Baldwin was going.

The lag came with him, one second of shapes and no depth, and he spent it standing beside a dead horse with a scythe in his hands — and then the world snapped back and Baldwin arrived exactly where Maeve had said he would.

James swung the released scythe through the red light gathered over the wound.

The blade went through both.

The physical cut opened the existing wound wider, straight through the plate. And the red reinforcement around it came apart and did not knit — it tried, twice, strands reaching back toward each other across the gap and failing, before it finally settled into something thinner than it had been.

[PRINCE BALDWIN — HP: 31,900 → 28,400]

"It doesn’t close!" James shouted. "Where I cut, it doesn’t close — hit the same place!"

Nobody asked him what he meant. Nobody had time to.

Raymond forced his brother into a counter he had already used twice and knew the shape of. Ronan put the shield across the escape line and let the impact go through his ruined arm rather than move. Finn came in on the wound from the opposite side, and Maeve held the brand alive on it while she was holding two other people upright, and Cillian spent one short interrupt at the exact moment Baldwin’s weight committed.

And James cut into the same opening with the scythe.

[PRINCE BALDWIN — HP: 28,400 → 22,100]

Baldwin gave four paces of ground and did not immediately take them back.

Raymond, on the far side of him, laughed once — a short ugly sound with no humour anywhere in it — and got his sword back up.

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** THE SCYTHE

**[ZeroFan]:** HE BROUGHT IT OUT

**[AshesAndBones]:** RED LIGHT DOESNT LIKE THAT THING

**[user88317]:** HIT HIM AGAIN

**[FrontierWife]:** RAYMOND MOVE

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** RONANS ARM IS DONE

---

Then Baldwin took the formation apart with nothing but force.

He went at the weak points in order, and he did it the way a man clears a doorway.

Ronan took another direct strike on the failing side and this time the shield went down to his hip and stayed there, and he could not lift it back to guard.

Finn was caught in the recovery of a swing and opened across the shoulder, and it was deep.

Raymond put himself between Baldwin and James, which was brave and correct and lasted about four seconds before he was beaten back onto the bad leg.

Maeve was holding three people at once and none of them properly.

And Cillian raised the working arm for something large, and the hand did not close, and the conductors flickered and produced a spray of light that went nowhere.

James kept fighting.