Chapter 358 - 349 — The Last Wave I

Chapter 358: Chapter 349 — The Last Wave I

The Prime hit Finn’s axes and Finn did not stop it.

He got both hafts up crossed and got his weight behind them and it made no difference whatsoever — the thing came through at the speed it had been running and Finn went back four metres with his boots off the flags for the last two of them, and hit the seventh pillar with his shoulder blades.

Ronan got the second one.

It came round the outside of the Prime going for the gap where Finn had been, and Ronan put the shield into its chest on a strapped arm and a right shoulder and stopped it dead, and the noise the two of them made was enormous.

Then it clawed him.

Four hooks down the front of the shield with a sound like a saw going into a nail, and Ronan gave a metre and kept the thing in front of him, and behind him the entrance end of the hall was open all the way to the four steps.

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

No skeletons.

---

James had nothing to put in anybody’s way and eleven seconds ago had been counting on thirty.

The seven behind the Prime were already splitting — four wide to the right along the pillar line and three going left into the wall run — and he watched all of it and understood the shape of the problem in about a second.

*Third wave stood still. This one won’t.*

Every position they had held in this hall had been built for enemies that walked. The pillars had been cover against a thing that fired. The wall run had been a route past something that could not turn round quickly. Team Zero was spread across forty metres of floor with four separate approaches into it, and every one of those approaches had something coming up it at a sprint.

"*Back*," he shouted. "All of you, back, toward the steps — *now* —"

"We can hold—"

"You can’t hold four ways, Finn. *Back.*"

---

They gave ground and it was not orderly and it was the right decision.

Ronan came out first because Ronan could not be the last one out of anything with one arm, and Finn covered him with both axes and then came himself and took a set of claws across the back of the shoulder for it. Cillian went twenty metres in a straight line without looking at anything. Maeve was already moving before James finished the word.

And all four of them ran back over the ground Team Zero had fought the second wave on.

Which was covered in bodies.

Eleven Husk Soldiers. Two Shrouded Dead. Five Bone Chanters. Six Throne Sentries in full harness further back still, and three High Servants in long coats, and a First Servant lying on its face where James had put it.

James went down on one knee in the middle of all of it with a Clawed Fiend eleven metres away and did the only useful thing he could do.

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×3`

`[MANA: 1,590 / 3,100]`

Eighteen seconds. Ronan bought him eleven of them and Finn bought the rest.

Three came up — two Sentries in plate and one High Servant, which was the largest raise he had ever had off that kind of body — and James did not think about the arithmetic at all, because there had been four hundred and eighty mana between him and being a man with a sword.

---

The narrow ground did the rest.

Two pillars, four metres apart, twenty-two metres back from where they had been standing — and with the pair of them either side, the whole width of the hall stopped mattering. Four routes became one.

Finn and Ronan stood in it. James put the three skeletons out in front of them across the mouth. Cillian got behind the left-hand pillar with an angle down the gap, and Maeve stood behind all of it where she could see both flanks.

The Clawed Fiends came into it one at a time because that was all it would take.

"*Better,*" Finn shouted.

"Don’t say better."

It was better. It was also not working for the reason James wanted it to work, and he found that out about ninety seconds in.

---

Maeve found the Prime first.

It had stopped coming at the gap after the second attempt. It had gone right, wide, all the way out past the pillar line to the eastern wall, and it was moving along the outside of the hall at a pace that put it level with them and then past them.

"*James* — the big one, it’s gone right, it’s going *round*—"

He got his head out from behind the pillar for half a second.

Thirty metres away and still moving, and about four seconds from having a clean line at a man who was standing behind a pillar looking the other way.

"Cillian, *move*, it’s coming at your side—"

"I can’t see anything—"

"*MOVE.*"

James sent two of the three across its route.

They were not going to stop it and they did not stop it. What they did was arrive in its path at an angle, so that a thing running at forty kilometres an hour on a converging line either went through two armoured bodies or bent its own route round them, and it bent.

It cost it about two and a half seconds.

Cillian used them. He came off the left-hand pillar, crossed the gap behind Ronan and got behind the next one along — and when the Prime came round the last of the skeletons he was not where it had been going, and he had a line on it, and it had to break off entirely and come back into the hall.

`[SUMMONED UNIT DESTROYED]`

"That was close," said Cillian, in a voice about half an octave up.

"That was Maeve," said James.

---

The Fiends in the gap changed what they were doing about a minute later.

One of them stopped trying to get between Finn and Ronan. It planted both feet at three metres, opened its chest, and what came out of it went down the whole length of the gap.

James felt the heat on the side of his face from eleven metres back and behind a pillar.

It was fire and it was under pressure — a solid stream rather than a burst, aimed low and swept up, and it filled four metres of floor between two pillars for about two and a half seconds.

Ronan did the only thing available. He got a fistful of Finn’s harness with his working hand and took both of them sideways out of the gap, and they went out of it into the open on the left-hand side, and the stream went past them and put a black stripe up the face of the pillar.

Finn came out of it with the left side of his coat gone and the arm underneath it scorched from the elbow to the shoulder.

He did not make a sound about it. He got his axe back into that hand and the fingers worked and that was all anybody had time to check.

And the gap was empty.

Two more Clawed Fiends came through it before Ronan could get back into the mouth.

---

James put his last skeleton into one of them and it lasted four seconds.

`[SUMMONED UNIT DESTROYED]`

*Right. This doesn’t work either.*

The pillars stopped four of them arriving at once, which was the only reason anybody was still standing. But a thing that could put fire down the gap did not need to come through the gap, and every time it did, Finn and Ronan had to leave — and every time they left, two more got in.

They were going to be pushed back through this hall a pillar at a time until there was nowhere left to be pushed to.

"We’re not holding," he said. "We have to take some of them off the board."

"I’m aware," said Finn, through his teeth.

---

So they did it the way they had done the third wave: one at a time, and take the time it takes.

James got two more up off a High Servant and a Sentry.

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

`[MANA: 1,430 / 3,100]`

He did not put them in the gap. He put them out on the left, in the open, where three of the Fiends had gone — not to fight them, to *stand near them*, because a Clawed Fiend that has something in reach attacks it, and two skeletons out on the left meant two fewer things coming up the middle.

That left one in the gap.

Finn took its attention and Ronan pinned it against the pillar and Cillian shot it from eleven metres in the side while it was committed, and when it turned on Cillian, Finn put an axe through the back of its knee.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 1,370 / 3,100]`

`[CLAWED FIEND SLAIN]`

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

Finn went into the space it had been standing in before the body hit the flags, and Ronan came with him close enough that nothing could get between them.

After that it was a rhythm rather than a plan. Isolate, pin, open, finish, step forward into the ground. It took eleven minutes and it cost James three more skeletons and both of Cillian’s remaining small reserves, and by the end of it the floor between the two pillars was a mess and there were five Clawed Fiends dead in it.

`[CLAWED FIENDS SLAIN ×6]`

`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +120]`

`[MANA: 1,520 / 3,100]`

---

The Prime came back for the last of it.

It had spent six minutes going round the outside of the hall looking for a way in that was not the gap, and it had not found one, and when the sixth of its own pack went down it came straight at the middle at full speed.

"*Spread*," said Maeve. "Don’t stand together, it’ll take you both—"

Finn went left and Ronan went right and it went at Finn, because Finn was the one still moving properly.

Cillian hit it in the flank from eleven metres as it passed him.

That was the moment it made its mistake. It felt the hit, and it turned — mid-charge, at speed, off a man it was two metres from killing — and went at the one who had hurt it instead.

Which meant it went past Ronan.

Ronan Cleary had been standing on a floor with one working arm and half his breathing for twenty-two minutes waiting for something to do exactly that.

He got the shield into its path at hip height and put every kilo he had left behind it, and the Prime’s own speed did most of the work — it went off the shield face at an angle, lost the line completely, and came down hard on its shoulder nine metres short of Cillian.

Finn was on it before it got up.

James put both his remaining skeletons behind it, across the route back into the open hall, and it never got to use its speed again. It got up into Finn on one side and Ronan coming in on the other and two dead men in plate standing where it wanted to go, and at eleven metres Cillian did not have a big one left and did not need one.

Finn finished it.

`[CLAWED FIEND — PRIME — SLAIN]`

`[CLAWED FIENDS SLAIN ×7]`

`[EXP GAINED: 6,700]`

`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 33,945 / 78,000]`

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

`[MANA: 1,580 / 3,100]`