Chapter 357 - 348 — The Throne’s Champions III (Bonus)

Chapter 357: Chapter 348 — The Throne’s Champions III (Bonus)

"Right," said James. "Nobody’s going up that side."

"I can kill that," said Cillian.

"How many of the two have you got left?"

"...Two."

"Then no, you can’t, because they’ll put another one up." James pulled his last skeleton back out of the lane rather than watching it burn, which cost him eleven seconds and two metres of dignity. "I’m not feeding them. Every one I put in that lane is eighty mana into a thing that doesn’t even move."

"So we go at them," said Finn. He was already looking down the hall. "Now, before there’s six of those. Straight up the middle, I’ll take the nearest one, and—"

"And they’re forty metres apart," said Ronan.

Finn stopped.

"You go up the middle, you’re in front of four of them at once," Ronan went on. He was still breathing badly and it made him talk in short pieces. "Two on your left. One right. One at the steps that throws lightning. And everything behind you is Maeve and Cillian in the open."

"Then what?"

"Outer edge," said Maeve.

She had been at the pillar with her head round it for most of a minute.

"Left-hand wall. There’s a run between the pillar line and the wall — three metres, maybe four — and if we go up *that*, the seventh pillar sits between us and the far one on the right the whole way. That’s one of the four that can’t see us at all." She came back in. "We come out level with the second Servant and we take them in order from that end. We don’t fight four. We fight one, four times."

James looked at her for a second.

"Ronan first, Finn on his shoulder, you behind me," he said. "Cillian, you’re not coming into the run — stay on this pillar and keep the First Servant looking at you, because the second he starts throwing lightning down that gap we’re finished."

"Keep the big one looking at me."

"Keep the big one looking at you."

"I hate this plan and I’m doing it."

---

They went up the wall run and it worked for about ninety seconds.

Ronan led it with the shield on a strapped arm and his right shoulder behind it, and the seventh pillar did exactly what Maeve had said it would. The far Servant on the right never got a line on them. The two Ember Coils burned the central lane and the right-hand lane and neither of them could turn far enough to reach the wall.

They came out level with the second High Servant at eleven metres.

Finn went at it.

It had no weapon and it did not need one — it caught the first axe on a forearm that should have come off and did not, and hit Finn in the chest with an open hand hard enough to put him back three metres.

And then the First Servant, sixty metres away at the foot of the steps, raised one hand with the blue still crawling on it.

"*DOWN*—"

It did not throw a bolt. What came down the hall was a sheet — a flat plane of blue-white about four metres wide that went between two pillars and across the wall run and into the stone, and everything it touched got a black mark on it.

Ronan got the shield up and got most of himself and all of Maeve behind it, and it drove him down onto one knee and took the paint off the face of it.

Finn was on the floor and the sheet went over the top of him by about eighteen inches.

"*He can reach us in here,*" Maeve shouted.

"He can reach us anywhere," said James. "That’s what he’s for."

---

He changed the order of it there, on his knees behind Ronan, with the hall smelling of burnt stone.

"Cillian — off the Servants. All of it on the big one."

"I’ve two—"

"I don’t want you to kill it. I want you to make it duck." James got Finn up by the shoulder strap. "Every time that hand comes up I want something arriving at its head. It doesn’t have to land."

"That I can do all day."

"Then do it all day. Finn, Ronan — that one." He pointed at the Servant eleven metres away that had just put Finn on the ground. "We do not move off it until it’s finished. I don’t care what the others do."

---

It took four minutes and it cost him.

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

`[MANA: 1,990 / 3,100]`

He raised two off the Husk corpses behind them and did not send either one at the Servant. He put them at the mouth of the wall run, facing back down the hall, because the third and fourth High Servants had started coming along the pillar line toward the noise and somebody had to be standing in the gap.

One of them lasted ninety seconds. The Ember Coil by the sixth pillar got an angle on the mouth of the run when the third Servant walked past it and burned the skeleton from the hip up.

`[SUMMONED UNIT DESTROYED]`

And James let it go. He did not replace it. He had one thousand nine hundred and ninety mana and no idea how many waves were left, and eighty mana for eleven seconds of obstruction in a lane covered by a fire construct was a trade he would have taken on Floor 31 and would not take here.

He thought about the scythe.

He thought about it properly, for about three seconds, at the point where Finn took a second open-handed hit and went sideways into the wall — and then he did the sum and put it away.

Thirty minutes. That was all it was. It had never been more than that, and it did not make him faster, and it did not make Ronan’s arm work, and it did nothing whatsoever to a fire construct or a sheet of lightning. It cut the red. That was the whole of what it was for, and there was no red in that hall doing anything except lying in a groove under the floor going the other way.

*It’s for the thing at the end. If I burn it on a man in a coat, it’s gone when we get there.*

He kept his hand off it.

---

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]` ×2

`[MANA: 1,870 / 3,100]`

They killed the second High Servant between them, and it was ugly and slow and took everybody. Ronan held it with one arm. Finn opened it twice. James put both blasts into the same place in its side. Cillian never touched it once — he spent the whole four minutes making a thing sixty metres away flinch, and that was worth more than any damage he could have done.

`[HIGH SERVANT SLAIN]`

`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

`[MANA: 1,900 / 3,100]`

They did the third one the same way, and it took less time because they had done it once.

`[HIGH SERVANT SLAIN]`

The fourth was worse, because by then the First Servant had stopped trying to reach them with sheets and had come forward nine metres to get a better line, which meant Cillian’s interference was landing more often and mattering less.

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

`[MANA: 1,740 / 3,100]`

`[HIGH SERVANT SLAIN ×2]`

`[EXP GAINED: 3,200]`

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

`[MANA: 1,800 / 3,100]`

---

The First Servant came at Ronan.

It did it at exactly the moment Ronan was backing out of the wall run with Finn behind him, which was the moment Ronan was worst placed and least able to turn, and it came the last twenty metres at a walk with both hands up and the blue running off its fingers onto the floor.

James had two skeletons and put both of them in the gap between the seventh pillar and the wall.

They did not stop it. They were never going to stop it — it went through the first one like a door and the second one got both arms round its waist and was carried four metres before it came apart.

`[SUMMONED UNIT DESTROYED] ×2`

But it went through them at a walk instead of arriving, and Ronan got the shield round, and the hand that came down at his head hit a shield instead of a head.

Ronan went flat on his back.

And the thing was standing over him with its weight forward and both hands committed and its whole flank open, in the open, at eleven metres, with nothing at all between it and a man who had been making it flinch for nine minutes.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]`

"*That’s one*," Cillian shouted.

It hit the First Servant in the side of the ribs and moved it a metre off Ronan.

Finn was in the gap before the light was gone.

He came off the wall past Ronan’s feet, got both axes into the opened side, and put the thing down onto one knee — and James arrived from the other side and did the only thing he had left that was worth anything, which was to put Durendal into the base of its neck with both hands and all of the Strength he had spent five points on in September.

`[FIRST SERVANT SLAIN]`

`[EXP GAINED: 1,600]`

`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 27,245 / 78,000]`

`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

`[MANA: 1,830 / 3,100]`

The two Ember Coils went out about four seconds later, both at once, and the hall got noticeably darker.

---

Nobody moved for a moment.

Ronan was on his back and Maeve was already at him. Finn had a hand against the wall and was breathing through his teeth. Cillian sat down where he was.

"Right," said Maeve, eventually, from the floor. "What worked."

"One at a time," said Finn.

"One at a time, and Cillian on the big one the whole way." She was running her hands over Ronan’s chest plate. "Nobody killed anything on their own in that. Not one thing."

"Can he get up?" said James.

"He can get up. Ronan, can you get up."

Ronan got up.

It took him a while and he did it with his right hand on the wall, and when he was up he pulled the shield straps tighter with his teeth and did not say anything, and nobody asked him anything else.

`[MANA: 1,830 / 3,100]`

Nothing on the board. No skeletons at all. Eleven Husk corpses and three High Servants and a First Servant and two enormous wrapped things lying down the length of the hall behind them, which meant material, which meant he was not empty.

He just needed thirty seconds.

---

Sixty metres away, on the platform, the Steward lifted his hand.

"*No*," said Cillian.

---

They came off the platform on both sides and they did not walk.

They were demons in the way the Pit Runners had been demons and nothing else about them was the same. Two and a half metres, heavily muscled through the chest and the shoulders and the thighs, dark red-brown, running upright with the head carried low and forward. No armour anywhere. No weapons.

Their hands ended in four hooked claws each, and the claws were as long as James’s forearm.

Seven of them.

`[CLAWED FIEND]`

`[LEVEL: 63]`

`[HP: 12,200 / 12,200]`

And one more, coming off the steps last and passing the whole pack before it reached the bottom.

It was bigger and it was very obviously faster, and it hit the floor of the hall running and was eleven metres ahead of its own group inside three seconds.

`[CLAWED FIEND — PRIME]`

`[LEVEL: 65]`

`[HP: 26,000 / 26,000]`

---

"*They’re running,*" said Maeve.

James had about two seconds and he used them.

He had no skeletons. He had corpses forty metres behind him and eighty mana each and six seconds a body, and the Prime was going to cross sixty metres in about nine.

There was not going to be a screen. That was the whole assessment and he made it and moved on.

"Finn, Ronan — nearest approach, *now*, between the pillars, don’t come out into the open. Maeve, Cillian — off the wall, they’re going to cut that run, get behind me and get *back*—"

Cillian was already moving. Maeve got a fistful of Ronan’s harness and pulled him the first metre and then let go because he was going the right way.

The pack split at forty metres — four of them wide to the right along the pillar line, three going left into the wall run Team Zero had spent four minutes fighting in.

The Prime did not split with anybody.

It came straight down the middle at the two men standing in front of everyone else, at a speed nothing that size should have been able to hold, with its head down and both hands out.

Finn got his axes up.

Ronan got his shoulder behind a shield he could only hold with one arm.

And it arrived.