Chapter 359 - 350 — The Last Wave II

Chapter 359: Chapter 350 — The Last Wave II

The hall went quiet for the fourth time.

James went round all of them in about twenty seconds.

Finn: burned from elbow to shoulder down the left side, a cleaver cut through the thigh from the first wave that had been open for half an hour, claws across the back of one shoulder, and a hand that had started to shake when he was not holding something.

Ronan: one arm, one lung, and a shield with four fresh gouges in the face of it.

Cillian: nothing on him at all and nothing left in him either. He had spent his last Lightning Impact on the First Servant and everything smaller since.

Maeve: untouched, because she had been where she was supposed to be for forty minutes, and had not stopped talking for any of it, and was hoarse.

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

Two skeletons.

"Go now," said Finn.

"What?"

"*Now.*" He pointed up the hall with an axe. "Sixty metres, nothing in between, and he’s sitting there. Every time we stop he puts more of them on the floor. We go now and we’re on him before he can."

James looked at the throne.

It was a good argument and he wanted very badly to take it.

"No," said Ronan.

"Ronan—"

"Look at us." He did not raise his voice, mostly because he could not. "If we go up that hall and he stands up and puts another six on the floor behind us, we’re in the open in the middle of his own room with our backs to them, and I can’t turn round fast and neither can you." He got the shield strap in his teeth again. "Two minutes. Get the line back and then go."

James gave it to Ronan.

"Two minutes," he said. "James, get bodies up. Cillian, get to the left pillar and—"

---

They got about forty seconds.

The Steward stood up.

It was the first time he had moved anything except his right hand, and every head in that hall came round to it — and he did not come down the steps. He put his weight forward, raised the hand, and held it there for longer than he had before.

The floor at the foot of the platform came apart.

---

They were enormous.

Three metres and thicker than that through the chest — Ronan was a big man and any one of them would have made two of him. Grey-black hide, cracked and ridged like old bark, so thick across the shoulders and the back that James could see where it had been cut in the past and had simply closed over. No weapons, because their forearms were bigger than most weapons, ending in hands that had four fingers and no thumbs.

The faces were the worst part, and James did not look at them twice.

There were five of them and they came up in a block, and they did not sprint.

They came down off the platform together and *stayed* together, moving at a heavy walk, shoulder to shoulder in a line with about half a metre between them — and when the two on the outside drifted, the ones beside them slowed until they came back in.

`[MAULER]`

`[LEVEL: 64]`

`[HP: 19,000 / 19,000]`

And in the middle of them, a head taller than any of the others, with hide that had gone almost black and a section of its own shoulder missing and grown back wrong:

`[GREAT MAULER]`

`[LEVEL: 67]`

`[HP: 34,000 / 34,000]`

"Thirty-four," said Maeve.

"I know."

"That’s more than the man on thirty."

"*I know.*"

---

James went for the gap, because the gap had worked.

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

`[MANA: 1,420 / 3,100]`

Four skeletons across the mouth of it, Finn and Ronan behind them, everybody else behind that, and a four-metre opening that five things three metres wide could not all come through at once.

The first Mauler reached the screen and hit the nearest skeleton.

It did not break it. It *threw* it — a flat open-handed strike that took a hundred and twenty kilos of armoured dead man off the ground and sent it backwards four metres into the one behind, and both of them went down in a heap across the inside of the gap, and for a second and a half the mouth was open and full of bone.

The second Mauler came through the space and hit Ronan.

He got the shield up. It did not matter much. He went back three full metres with his heels ploughing and his shoulder blades hit the pillar behind him and stopped him, and the shield came down to hip height because his right arm had taken the whole of it and his left was not there to help.

"*RONAN*—"

Finn went across to cover him.

And the Great Mauler walked into the space Finn had just left.

—

James saw the whole shape of it then and it was very simple and very bad.

The gap stopped them arriving together. It did not stop them *moving people*. Every single thing in that pack could put a man backwards three metres with one hit, and Finn and Ronan were standing in a four-metre space with pillars on both sides and a wall of bone behind them.

Three metres was the whole width of the room they had.

One more of those and Ronan was against stone with nowhere to go, and the next one after that would land on a man who could not step back out of it.

"*Ronan* — can you move—"

"I need *space*," Ronan shouted, and it cost him most of what he had.

"Then everybody out. Out into the middle, out of the gap — *go*—"

---

It took eleven seconds and they had to earn all of them.

Cillian went first this time, backwards, putting his last small bolts into the face of the nearest Mauler — not to hurt it, because he could not hurt it, but because a thing with light going off in its eyes does not step forward.

Maeve went next and went wide, along the route she had walked four times in the last hour and could have done with her eyes shut.

Finn got Ronan by the harness with his burned arm and hauled, and the two of them came out of the gap sideways with the Great Mauler’s hand going through the air where Ronan’s head had been.

James was last, and he did the one thing that was worth doing, which was to leave both surviving skeletons standing in the mouth of the gap doing nothing at all.

They lasted about six seconds between them.

Six seconds was the eleven metres.

`[SUMMONED UNIT DESTROYED] ×2`

---

Out in the open, with thirty metres of hall in every direction, James stopped trying to hold anything.

"New plan. Nobody holds a line. We’re going to take them apart one at a time and we’re going to *make* the gaps because they won’t give us any."

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

`[MANA: 1,260 / 3,100]`

He sent both of them out to the right — not at the pack, past it, wide, toward the eastern wall and then forward, so that they ended up level with the Maulers on that flank and eleven metres off them.

Then he had them attack.

Badly, and pointlessly, and without any chance of achieving anything. Two skeletons hitting a nineteen-thousand-hit-point thing in the hip is not an attack. It is a nuisance.

But it is a nuisance *happening on that side*, and the Mauler on the right-hand end of the line turned to deal with it, and took a step, and then another.

And the one beside it slowed and turned its head, the way they had all been doing since they came off the platform — and this time the one that had drifted did not come back, because it had something in reach.

Half a metre became two metres became five.

"*Finn.*"

"I see it."

---

Finn went into the five metres.

He did not attack the separated one. He got between it and the rest of the pack and stood there with both axes, four metres from a thing three times his weight, and made himself the only thing it could reach that was worth reaching.

It turned on him.

And it was on its own.

"*That’s it,*" Maeve shouted. "That’s the one — Cillian, left flank clear, go—"

Cillian hit it in the side of the head from eighteen metres with the last small thing he had.

It swung at Finn and Finn had to leave — he took the swing on both hafts and it still put him back three metres and onto one knee, and it went after him.

James spent a skeleton to stop that.

He put one directly across its path from the flank and it went through it without breaking stride and the skeleton came apart, and it cost the Mauler about a second, and a second was Finn getting his feet back.

`[SUMMONED UNIT DESTROYED]`

Ronan held the line against the other four — not fighting them, standing in front of them, with a shield at hip height and no left arm, and he did not stop them and he did not need to. He made them come to him instead of going to Finn, and that was the whole job.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]` ×2

`[MANA: 1,140 / 3,100]`

Finn came back in when it turned its head, and put both axes into the same place behind the knee, and it went down onto that side — and James put two blasts into the wreck of the joint, and Finn took the throat.

`[MAULER SLAIN]`

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

`[MANA: 1,170 / 3,100]`

---

The Great Mauler adjusted immediately.

That was the thing that turned the fight from hard into the worst twenty minutes of the floor. After the first one died, it stopped letting them drift. It put itself on the open flank, and when James sent skeletons wide, the whole line came round together instead of one of them going out to meet it.

They had to make the gaps smaller and take them faster.

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

`[MANA: 1,010 / 3,100]`

They got the second one seven minutes later and paid for it with three skeletons and a second burn on Finn’s already-burned side, and the third took nine minutes and cost them the middle of the hall.

`[MAULERS SLAIN ×3]`

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

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

---

And then it nearly ended.

Finn was eleven metres out on the right with the fourth Mauler, halfway through it, with the thing down on one knee and both axes in it.

Ronan was holding the Great Mauler and the fifth one on his own in the centre.

The Great Mauler hit him.

Not a swing — it stepped in and drove the flat of a forearm into the top of the shield, downward, and Ronan went off his feet entirely for the first time all day. He came down on his back four metres away and the shield went with him because it was strapped and nearly took his arm with it.

The Great Mauler took one step toward him.

"*RONAN*—"

Finn abandoned the kill.

He left a nineteen-thousand-hit-point thing on one knee behind him with both axes still coming out of it and crossed eleven metres, and got between the Great Mauler and a man on his back on the flags, and that was the right decision and it created the second crisis inside a second and a half — because the one he had left got up.

James was already moving both skeletons.

He put them into the one Finn had abandoned, and he did not expect them to do anything at all, and they did not — but a thing with two dead men hanging off its arms takes three seconds to shake them off and walks rather than runs for the first four after that.

"*Cillian, get out of the middle—*"

"Going—"

"Maeve—"

"*Left, along the wall, I’ve got him,*" Maeve shouted, already going, already with a hand out for Cillian’s sleeve.

Ronan got up.

He did it on one elbow and one knee with no help from anybody and an arm that did not work and half his breathing, and he got the shield off the flags and he got it up, and by the time the Great Mauler reached him he was on his feet and behind it, and it hit him again and he did not go down that time.

"*Go on then*," James heard him say, in a voice like a man with a nail in his lung.