Chapter 275 - 266 — After the Crown I

Chapter 275: Chapter 266 — After the Crown I

Alice stood where she was and let them look at her, and James did not reach for the interface.

That was all it took. There was no test in it and nothing was decided. He had said she stayed out, and so she stayed out, and the moment passed the way ordinary moments do.

Nobody else moved much either.

James let the last of the manifestation go. The wing frames crumbled off his back into ash, the cracked ring thinning out above his shoulders and going dark. He kept the scythe in his hand, because putting it away would have required a decision and he did not have one available.

Ronan was sitting in the mud with what was left of his shield across his knees, both arms down.

Finn had his hands on his thighs and was breathing through his mouth in a slow careful rhythm around whatever was open in his side.

Maeve was still moving between people, still putting light on things, doing it on instinct now rather than judgement, because stopping had not occurred to her yet.

And Cillian was standing very still, looking at his own arm, turning the hand over.

The stream did not share their exhaustion.

[VIEWERS: 40,000,000+]

**[ZeroFan]:** LETS GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

**[GalwayGoblin]:** FLOOR 25!!!!!!!!!!!! 🇮🇪🇮🇪🇮🇪🇮🇪🇮🇪

**[FinnsLeftAxe]:** THEY FUCKING DID IT

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** RONAN IS ALIVE 😭😭😭

**[CorkClimber]:** BROKEN CROWN IS DONE

**[RaymondWasRight]:** RAYMOND 😭😭😭😭

**[CrownLawIE]:** BALDWIN IS ACTUALLY DEAD

**[user88317]:** I HAVE BEEN WATCHING THIS FOR HOURS WHAT THE FUCK

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

[DONATION RECEIVED: €10,000]

[DONATION RECEIVED: €25,000]

[Anonymous donated €50,000]: TEAM ZERO 🇮🇪

[CHALLENGER DONATION RECEIVED: 2,500 TC]

[DONATION RECEIVED: €50,000]

[Anonymous donated €100,000]: FLOOR TWENTY FIVE

The paid messages kept sitting on top of the slow mode, one after another, faster than anybody could have read them.

Then James turned his head and saw Raymond.

---

He had not moved from where he went down.

He was on both knees in the churned ground beside his brother’s body, and he had stopped looking at Team Zero entirely, not out of rudeness, simply because they had ceased to be in the world he was currently occupying.

Raymond reached out and got a hand under Baldwin’s shoulder and turned him properly onto his back.

It took him three attempts. His own side was open and his arm did not want to take the weight, and he did it anyway, slowly, until his brother was lying straight.

Nobody went over.

Finn straightened up and stopped where he was. Ronan did not try to get off the ground. Maeve’s hands came down. Cillian, who had a joke for every silence any of them had ever stood in, did not say anything at all.

Alice watched with her wings folded and her face unreadable.

Raymond put two fingers to Baldwin’s eyes and closed them.

Then he sat back on his heels and began to talk.

---

It did not come out well. That was the thing James remembered afterward.

"I told them you were—" Raymond stopped. Started again. "Every officer. Every muster. Every time somebody asked me why we were marching south instead of north at the *worst*, I told them what you were."

He was not crying. His voice had gone somewhere flat and uneven, catching on words that should not have caught.

"Said you were the king who sent men against his own frontier. Said you’d declared four thousand of my lads traitors for holding a wall. Said—"

He stopped again, longer this time.

"I said a lot of things about you."

Somewhere east, the war was still ending. The sound had thinned out to almost nothing.

"And I *needed* them," Raymond said. "That’s the part. I needed every one of them, because I couldn’t get on a horse otherwise. Couldn’t put my sword through a man in Crown colours otherwise. I had to make you into something first."

His hand was flat on his brother’s breastplate now.

"I hated what you did. God, I hated what you did. The proclamations. The bridge. Redfield; you took the medicine, Bal, there were people north of that depot with their legs going black and you *took the medicine*—"

His voice went entirely.

He sat there for a while with his hand on the armour and did not try to speak.

When it came back it was much quieter.

"But I never managed the other bit. Tried for months. Really tried." He shook his head slowly. "I spent half this war trying to learn how to hate you. Couldn’t manage it."

Somewhere in the last minute, Team Zero had all stopped moving entirely.

"I wanted you stopped," Raymond said. "I never wanted you gone."

He wiped his face with the back of a wrist that had somebody else’s blood on it, which only made it worse.

"D’you know, I used to run it," he said. "On the road. Coming south. I’d have it out in my head, reaching you, what I’d say, what you’d say back. Sometimes I killed you. Sometimes you got me. Sometimes one of us just put it down. Said enough. Sat down and had it out like men."

His shoulders went.

"Hundreds of times, Bal. Hundreds. And not once, not one single time, did I do this one." His hand tightened on the breastplate. "Sitting beside you. Wanting to hear your voice. That one never came up."

---

The stream stopped celebrating.

**[FrontierWife]:** WHO THE FUCK IS CUTTING ONIONS 😭😭😭😭😭

**[user88317]:** BRO I WAS CELEBRATING THIRTY SECONDS AGO WHY AM I CRYING

**[RaymondWasRight]:** HE NEVER HATED HIM 😭😭😭😭😭

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** STOPPPPPPP 😭😭😭😭

**[CorkClimber]:** THATS STILL HIS BROTHER MAN

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** five floors of this war and he still loved him

**[GalwayGoblin]:** I DID NOT SIGN UP TO CRY LIKE THIS 😭😭😭

**[FinnsLeftAxe]:** nah man this hurts

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

[DONATION RECEIVED: €25,000]

[Anonymous donated €50,000]: Raymond 😭

[DONATION RECEIVED: €75,000]

[CHALLENGER DONATION RECEIVED: 5,000 TC]

[Anonymous donated €100,000]: For the brothers.

---

Raymond picked up Baldwin’s sword.

He looked at it for a moment, a king’s blade, the thing every man on that field would have taken south as proof, and then he laid it down along his brother’s right side and folded Baldwin’s hand back over the grip.

He kept his own palm against the armour a second longer.

Then he got up.

It was a bad process. He got one boot under himself and the leg refused, and he had to use his sword as a stick and take three goes at it, and nobody offered him a hand because nobody was going to insult him like that.

When he was up he stood looking south, at the pale walls of Caerleon, which were beginning to go slightly indistinct at the edges the way the whole field was.

Then he turned his head north.

The monster host was still out there. The pass was still open. His Legion was somewhere behind him at half strength, and the frontier he had spent two years bleeding on was still a frontier, and the man who had made all of it necessary was lying at his feet and could not be shouted at about any of it.

James came over then, because it seemed like the moment.

Raymond looked at him for a while.

"You came here to kill him," he said. "That was your order. Whatever it is that gives you people orders."

"Yes."

"Aye." Raymond nodded slowly. "Thought so at Dunadd. Foreign fighters with a purpose they wouldn’t say. I’ve had enough men like that."

"It stopped being that," James said.

"I know." Raymond’s eyes went to Finn, and Ronan on the ground, and Maeve. "That’s the only reason I’m talking to you. Men following an order don’t hold a bridge for two thousand people who aren’t theirs."

He put his hand out, and James took it, and neither of them said thank you because it would have been too small.

Then Raymond’s gaze moved past his shoulder and stopped on Alice.

The wings. The halo. The First Disciple of Lust standing four meters away with her hands folded, watching a prince of Caerleon with polite interest.

Raymond looked at her for a long moment.

"No," he said. "No, I’ve nothing left for that today."

"Probably wise," James said.

"I’m going to go and sit down somewhere and think about my life." He was already turning back to his brother. "You lot were never in my kingdom. That’s what I’ll be telling people."

---

The field began to go in earnest.

The banners thinned first, then the bodies, then the smoke. The two armies faded out of the middle distance in pieces, and the walls of Caerleon dissolved into white beyond them, and the churned ground under everyone’s boots stopped being ground.

Raymond stayed where he was, beside Baldwin, and did not watch any of it go.

[RETURN TO EARTH IN: 60 SECONDS]

**[ZeroFan]:** TEAM ZERO ❤️❤️❤️

**[RaymondWasRight]:** RAYMOND PLEASE DONT DIE 😭

**[FrontierWife]:** BYE RAYMOND 😭😭😭

**[GalwayGoblin]:** SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME WE SEE HIM AGAIN

**[CorkClimber]:** WHAT A FUCKING ARC

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** FIVE FLOORS 😭

[Anonymous donated €100,000]: TEAM ZERO.

Nobody made a speech.

Maeve did not turn back into a presenter, and James did not say anything to forty million people, and the five of them simply stood in a dissolving world being too tired to perform.

[FLOOR EXIT — BROADCAST TERMINATED]

The chat went out.

James had not realised how loud it had been until the corner of his vision was empty, hours of it, constant, a bright churn he had stopped consciously seeing somewhere around the second boss. It was gone, and what replaced it was nothing at all, and the silence sat oddly in his skull.

Then the light took them.