Chapter 305 - 296 — What You Give Him II

Chapter 305: Chapter 296 — What You Give Him II

It nearly did not work.

The Last Defender read it inside two exchanges, and what he did about it was the most frightening thing he had done all day.

He let Finn hit him.

Deliberately — turned his shoulder into a cut he could have avoided, took eight hundred and something for nothing, and let the small mass of red gather at the wound while Finn was still recovering.

Then he held it.

He held it for four seconds, fighting normally, while Ronan drove into him and forced him to plant his shield to take the pressure — and the instant Ronan’s shield went down and his weight went into it, the Last Defender spent everything he had into that exact point.

Ronan’s whole front went out from under him.

He did not fall. He went sideways and lost the line completely, and there was suddenly nothing at all between the Last Defender and the man with the scythe.

He turned on James.

Finn got there.

He came in from the outside and caught the sword arm at the wrist with both axe hafts crossed, and he could not hold it, and he did not need to hold it — he needed to hold it for a second.

Alice came down into the other route.

She did not strike. She landed in the path he wanted, planted, and simply did not permit it, and the Last Defender’s whole advance folded against a wall of somebody who would not move and would not give him anything to throw.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

Small. Into the knee. Just enough to cost him a correction.

"*NOW,*" Maeve shouted. "James, he’s held, GO—"

James was already three steps in, because he had started before she called it, the way she had made him practise until he stopped arguing about it.

---

He did not go for the wound.

The deepest damage on the man was the hole Alice had opened under his arm and every instinct James owned wanted to put a blade in it.

He went for the light instead — the mass of red still banked across the Defender’s torso from Finn’s last cut and two of Alice’s, gathered and waiting and not yet spent.

The scythe went through it.

The physical blade cut him. That happened, and it mattered, and the number moved.

`[THE LAST DEFENDER — HP: 71,000 → 64,700]`

But that was not what James had come for.

The stored red split along the path of the blade.

It did not discharge. It did not go into Ronan or Maeve or anybody else. It came apart — the whole banked mass of it opening down the middle where the black edge had passed, both halves recoiling from the blade, and then failing to find each other again. It reached across. It failed. It reached again and failed again, exactly the way it had failed on a prince’s shoulder in the mud four floors ago.

And then it collapsed.

It did not sink into the ground. It did not run for a crack. It simply stopped being, and where a shield’s worth of stored force had been hanging across the man’s chest there was nothing at all.

Everything he had been holding was gone.

James got out of range with his heart going like a hammer.

---

"It’s gone," Cillian said. "Did — that’s *gone*, that’s not — where did it go—"

"He didn’t spend it." Maeve was up against a column with her left arm against her ribs and she was almost laughing. "He didn’t spend it. James took it *off* him."

"So—"

"So we’ve got a way to kill him."

She said it fast, because the man was still standing.

"Listen. We give him damage on purpose. Not Alice’s kind — controlled, measured, enough that he banks it and not so much that it takes one of us off the floor if it goes wrong. We hold him with the formation. James cuts the pile before he can throw it. Then we do it again. And again."

"That’s forty minutes of work," said Finn.

"It’s a plan," said Ronan, from the floor.

"It’s a *terrible* plan," said Cillian.

"It’s the only one anybody’s had all day," said Maeve.

---

Then the Last Defender staggered.

He had not done that either. Not when Alice put a blade through him, not when Cillian burned his shoulder plate, not once in eleven minutes.

He took one step back and put a hand down on the flagstones.

And the layer of red on him lost its symmetry.

Everywhere James’s blade had passed, the surface stayed bare — a clean stripe across the chest and ribs where there was skin and armour and nothing else, while the rest of him was still evenly and perfectly covered.

For four seconds, that stripe did not fill in.

That was the longest anything on this floor had been out of his control.

Then every red line under the courtyard lit at once.

---

Not toward Team Zero.

James felt the flagstones go from warm to hot through his boots and looked down and the whole floor was burning — every seam, every crack, every join between every stone, all of it lit and all of it running the same direction.

Into him.

It came up out of the ground at the Last Defender’s feet and went into him, and kept going into him, more of it than he could possibly be holding, pouring up out of a dead world into one man.

His HP did not move.

`[THE LAST DEFENDER — HP: 64,700 / 95,000]`

The wound under his arm stayed open. The stripe across his chest stayed bare.

It was not healing him.

It was something else and James did not know what.

`[MAIN STORYLINE UPDATED]`

Nothing followed it.

---

And then the courtyard began to change.

James had seen the Tower do this once before, above a burnt kingdom, when it had run five hundred years of Caerleon backwards in front of them so they would know what they were walking into.

It was not doing it above them this time.

It was doing it *around* them.

The soot went first — sliding up the columns and off them, drawing back toward the tops of the walls and away, leaving the stone pale. A section of the colonnade that had been three stumps and a heap grew its own pillars back out of the rubble, straightened, and took a roof. The keep behind the steps stopped being a ruin somewhere above the second floor and kept going up until it had a tower on it.

Ash lifted off the flagstones. All of it, everywhere, rising instead of falling, drifting up past their knees and their faces and away into a sky that was no longer flat white.

Maeve had her hand out and ash was going up through her fingers.

"James—"

"I see it."

There was a smell of cooking somewhere.

And then there were people.

They came into existence the way the columns had, not walking in from anywhere — a woman crossing the courtyard with something under her arm, two men at the foot of the steps, a line of soldiers along the eastern wall in colours nobody had ever seen, somebody laughing further off, a child on the parapet where the parapet had been rubble ninety seconds ago.

They did not look at Team Zero.

They did not look at anything. They moved through a courtyard that was full and lit and whole, in a stronghold in a city that had not burned yet, in a world that was still alive.

Finn had his axes down at his sides.

Cillian said, very quietly, "Oh."

And in the middle of all of it, standing exactly where James had cut him — with a hole under his arm and a bare stripe across his ribs and a dead world’s worth of red still pouring up into him out of the ground — the Last Defender stood among his own people and watched them come back.