Chapter 274 - 265 — No Other Door III (Bonus)

Chapter 274: Chapter 265 — No Other Door III (Bonus)

Baldwin did the correct thing, which was to hit the new arrival immediately and hard, before it settled — and he came at her with the same strike that had been throwing Ronan around the field like furniture.

Alice caught it on a blade of red-gold light that formed in her hand as she raised it.

She did not move backward. Her heels stayed where they were, the mud under them cracked outward in a short ring, and Baldwin’s sword stopped dead against the light.

Behind her, Finn stood up out of his crouch.

Ronan said, "*Oh.*"

Alice answered.

The counter came with her whole wingspan behind it and took Baldwin off his feet and three meters through the air into the churned ground.

He came up fast. He was still Baldwin, and he was still wrapped in something out of the earth beneath Caerleon, and he came at her again with everything the red light gave him.

She stayed on him.

He could not get past her. He could not go around her, because the wings closed every angle he tried, and when he committed hard enough to break through she simply took the hit on one forearm and put him down again.

And every time he tried to disengage and reach the man with the black weapon, James cut the red light off him and it failed to knit.

Twice Baldwin started toward James and turned back to Alice before he had covered three meters.

The third time he got four meters, took the scythe across the shoulder for it, and had to come back anyway with the wings already closing on him.

After that he stopped trying.

---

They finished it as seven.

Raymond went in first, because Raymond had earned that, and forced his brother to face the one threat on the field he could not ignore for tactical reasons.

Ronan got the shield up to his chest one last time — not to block anything, just to stand in the gap Baldwin needed and make him go round — and the ruined arm gave out entirely as he did it and he kept the shield up with his shoulder.

Maeve put the brand back where the scythe had already opened the light.

[HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]

Finn hit that mark with plain axe work, no skills, because Baldwin was a man his own size and the skills were built for other problems, and the second strike went through the plate the scythe had ruined and into what was underneath.

The armour over the hip came away in a piece.

Baldwin broke for the gap between Ronan and Raymond with the red speed that had saved him five times in twenty minutes.

Cillian had been standing there with nothing for four minutes waiting for exactly that.

[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]

[CILLIAN — CONDUIT FAILURE]

The bolt was thin and ugly and it cost him something that was not coming back inside a Waiting Room, and it did not need to hurt Baldwin at all.

It only had to make him hesitate for a third of a second.

Alice came down out of the air into that third of a second with both wings folded and all of her weight behind it, knocked his sword line out wide, and stood on the space he needed to recover into.

Baldwin still went for Raymond.

Not for escape. For his brother, with a sword he could barely hold and a hip he could not turn on, because there had never been anything else at the end of this for him.

Raymond caught it on his own blade and did not fall.

"No," he said.

Finn widened the wound. Ronan closed the last direction. Maeve kept three people standing who should not have been standing. Alice tore Baldwin’s guard open with one hand and held it open.

And James came through the gap with Azrael’s Broken Scythe.

He did not swing it like a man ending a duel. There was no line about it, no name called, nothing said at all. He put the black blade through Baldwin and through the red light gathered over him in the same movement, and both of them came apart together.

Baldwin went down.

The red flared once, violently, all around his body — and then it recoiled off him entirely, drew back across the churned ground in a hundred thin retreating lines, and sank down into the cracks it had come out of.

Going home, six kilometres south, underneath a palace.

[PRINCE BALDWIN SLAIN]

[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE COMPLETE]

[FLOOR 25 CLEARED]

---

The battlefield began to still, the way floors do when they are finished with you.

Nobody moved for a moment. Raymond was on both knees beside his brother’s body with his sword in the mud. Ronan was sitting down. Finn had his hands on his thighs. Cillian was looking at his own arm.

And the live feed was still running.

Forty million people were looking at James Ganner standing over a dead prince with a black scythe in his hands, a cracked ring of light behind his head, half-formed wings shedding ash off his back, and a horn coming out of his temple.

Beside him, at full height, wings spread, entirely undamaged, stood the boss of Floor 20.

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** ALICE

**[ZeroFan]:** SHE FOUGHT WITH THEM

**[user88317]:** SHE TALKED TO HIM

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** THAT WAS A DEAL. THAT WAS A DEAL ON STREAM

**[FrontierWife]:** SHES STILL THERE

**[CorkClimber]:** JAMES WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN HIDING

**[GalwayGoblin]:** SHES STILL THERE

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

James let the manifestation go. The eclipse thinned and broke and went out, the wing frames crumbled off his back, and the horn withdrew into his hairline and left nothing behind.

The scythe stayed in his hand.

He turned and looked at Alice, and she was already looking back at him, and she had gone very still in the way she went still when she was waiting for something.

Behind James, Maeve had stopped working on Finn’s shoulder.

James’s hand stayed where it was.

Ten seconds. Twenty. Long enough for it to stop being a delay and start being a decision, and the field around them went on quietly falling apart, and nobody reached for any interface at all.

Alice’s chin came up very slightly.

Maeve went back to Finn’s shoulder and did not say a word.

And Alice turned her head and looked directly into the empty air where the broadcast was, into forty million people who had spent three months being told she was dead, and let them look at her.