Chapter 356 - 347 — The Throne’s Champions II

Chapter 356: Chapter 347 — The Throne’s Champions II

The skeletons did not go back with them.

That was the whole of it. James left all three of them standing in the middle of the hall in the mouth of the Husk Soldiers’ advance — not fighting, not trying to win anything, just being three armoured bodies in the way of eleven that wanted to walk in a straight line.

The Husks went into them and slowed to about a third of the pace.

The Chanters came on past their own front rank to keep the angle.

"*Move.*"

Ronan went with Maeve behind the shield and covered twenty-two metres to the sixth pillar in about four seconds. Finn stood out from the fifth long enough to make five things look at him and then went after them. Cillian came last, from the third to the seventh, at a flat sprint with a volley arriving where he had been.

They did it again at the eighth.

And by the time they were behind the eighth pillar, the five Bone Chanters were standing in open floor around the fifth and sixth, and the two Shrouded Dead were still seventy metres back behind a scrum of Husk Soldiers trying to get past three dead men in plate.

---

"*Cillian.*"

"I see it."

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

The nearest Chanter went down twelve metres from the eighth pillar, on its face, and stayed there.

Nobody said anything for four seconds.

James watched the body. He watched the nearest Shrouded Dead, seventy metres back, lift its arm — he actually saw it do it, and he had no idea whether the thing had chosen that body or a closer one or whether it was doing anything at all.

The Chanter on the flags did not move.

"It’s not getting up," said Maeve.

"It’s not getting up."

"Do we know why?"

"No," said James. "I don’t know if it’s distance or the big one can’t see it or it’s already used something up. I know it’s on the floor and the last four weren’t." He put his shoulder back against the pillar. "That’s enough. Work the problem we’ve got."

---

After that it was cold work and it was quick.

Cillian killed four Bone Chanters in a hundred and ten seconds with a clear line and no interference, because five things that had walked out in front of their own support were five things that had nobody behind them.

`[BONE CHANTERS SLAIN ×5]`

`[EXP GAINED: 2,600]`

And Finn and Ronan did not chase a single one of them. They stood at the eighth pillar and took the two Husk Soldiers that had got through the skeletons and let the rest come at their own speed, because the entire point of the withdrawal had been to stop being in a hurry.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]` ×2

`[MANA: 2,190 / 3,100]`

`[HUSK SOLDIERS SLAIN ×2]`

`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +60]`

`[MANA: 2,250 / 3,100]`

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×2`

`[MANA: 2,090 / 3,100]`

---

The Husks took eight minutes and were not dangerous, one at a time, in a line.

The Shrouded Dead were.

The first of them came through the wreckage of its own front rank at the ten-minute mark, and Ronan stepped out to meet it because that was the job — and it stopped four metres short of him and opened.

That was the only word James had for it afterwards. The wrappings across the front of its head came apart down a seam and something came out.

It was not fire and it was not a spray. It was a slow green-grey fall, like something being poured, and it went out and down across five or six metres of floor and *stayed there*, sitting on the flags at knee height and spreading.

Ronan was moving backwards before the seam had finished opening. He got most of himself out of it.

He did not get all of himself out of it.

He came back past the pillar with his left arm hanging and the left side of his face wet, coughing in a way that James did not like at all, and he went down onto one knee for three or four seconds before he got up again.

"*Ronan*—"

"Don’t come in that," he said, into his own chest. "Don’t anybody come in that."

Maeve got to him and had his helmet off inside ten seconds.

"Breathe out. All of it. Again." She had a hand flat on his back. "Can you lift the arm?"

He could not lift the arm.

"Can you hold the shield?"

He could hold the shield. It was strapped. Holding it was not the same as using it and both of them knew it.

"I’m fine."

"You are not fine and I’m not fixing it here," said Maeve. "You’ve got a working right and one lung that’s doing most of the work and that’s what you’ve got for the rest of this floor. Do you understand me?"

"...Yeah."

---

James put a skeleton into the green.

It walked into the middle of it and stood there, and the Shrouded Dead — which had been coming forward round the edge of its own cloud toward Ronan — went at the skeleton instead and took its arm off at the shoulder with one swing.

That was four seconds.

Finn used them.

He came round the outside of the cloud entirely, wide, where the flags were clean, and hit the thing across the back of the knee while it had all its weight forward on a skeleton — and then again, and then a third time in the same place, and the whole enormous wrapped mass of it came down sideways onto the flagstones.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]`

"That’s two big ones left in me," Cillian said. "I’m saying it now so nobody asks later."

`[SHROUDED DEAD SLAIN]`

---

The second one came up the central lane on its own and did not open anything.

It had watched what happened to the first. James was not going to say that out loud on a broadcast, but it had, and it came up the middle with both arms out and tried to hold the lane between the pillars, and it was fifteen thousand eight hundred hit points of the hardest thing in the wave.

They killed it in about three minutes, together, with nobody doing anything clever.

Ronan held it with a shield on a strapped arm and his right shoulder behind it, and gave ground twice, and did not fall over. Finn worked one side. James put two skeletons on the other so that everything it did had to be a choice. Cillian did not spend a big one and said so.

Finn took the head off it at the third attempt.

`[SHROUDED DEAD SLAIN ×2]`

`[HUSK SOLDIERS SLAIN ×11]`

`[EXP GAINED: 7,500]`

`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 22,445 / 78,000]`

`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +90]`

`[MANA: 2,150 / 3,100]`

---

The hall went quiet.

James stood at the eighth pillar with his hands on his knees for four seconds and then made himself stop doing that.

Three skeletons left. Two thousand one hundred and fifty mana out of three thousand one hundred. Ronan with one arm and half his breathing. Finn with a cleaver cut through his trouser leg from the first wave that had opened again and a burn on his forearm from the second. Cillian with two.

And sixty metres up the hall, on a platform, a man in a dark surcoat sat in a chair with a sword across his knees and had not moved once.

He had not stood up. He had not spoken. He had watched two entire waves die in front of him and he had watched Team Zero walk thirty metres backwards down his own hall to do it, and he had lifted his hand precisely twice.

*He’s not the fight,* James thought. *He’s the door. And we’re paying to get to it.*

"How many more of these are there?" said Cillian.

Nobody answered him, because nobody knew, and that was the actual problem.

---

The Steward lifted his hand.

The third wave did not come up out of the floor.

They walked out from behind the platform — from both sides of it, unhurried, down the steps — and they were people.

Or they had been. Broad through the shoulders, upright, a head taller than Finn, in long dark coats of something heavy that reached to the ankle, with mail showing at the throat and the cuff. Their faces were grey and drawn and entirely human in shape, with the eyes gone to a flat dull colour, and every one of them had a shaved head.

They carried nothing. No weapons at all.

And they did not come down the central lane together.

That was the thing that put a cold finger on James’s neck before any of them did anything. The Pit Runners had screamed and charged. The Husks had walked in a line. These four came down off the platform and immediately went *wide* — two to the left, one to the right, one straight — moving between the pillars at a walking pace, taking up positions across forty metres of hall like people setting out chairs.

`[HIGH SERVANT]`

`[LEVEL: 61]`

`[HP: 14,600 / 14,600]`

The fifth one came down the steps last and stopped at the bottom of them, in the middle, and did not go anywhere.

It was the same, and bigger, and the coat on it had something worked into the hem in a thread that caught the light. There was a fine blue crawl over its hands and up the insides of both forearms that had not stopped since it appeared.

`[FIRST SERVANT]`

`[LEVEL: 64]`

`[HP: 24,000 / 24,000]`

It looked at Team Zero for a moment and then simply stood there, and the four others finished taking their positions.

---

James tested them with two skeletons because he was not going to send people.

He walked them up the left-hand lane, past the seventh pillar, at the nearest of the four.

The High Servant watched them come to within about fifteen metres. Then it put one hand down toward the flags without crouching.

Something came up out of the floor beside the sixth pillar.

It was about two metres tall and it did not move from where it appeared. A thick coiled base of something that was not quite fire and not quite metal, and out of the top of it, three separate heads on three separate necks, each one about the length of a forearm, turning independently.

All three of them turned toward the skeletons.

Then they fired.

`[EMBER COIL]`

`[LEVEL: 58]`

`[HP: 3,200 / 3,200]`

The first skeleton lost both legs in under two seconds and the second one lasted four.

`[SUMMONED UNIT DESTROYED] ×2`

And the heads kept turning, and kept firing, and the lane between the sixth and seventh pillars — which Team Zero had withdrawn through eleven minutes ago and had been treating as their own ground ever since — stopped being usable.

A second one came up forty metres further along by a different Servant, covering the right-hand lane.