Chapter 360 - 351 — The Last Wave III (Bonus)

Chapter 360: Chapter 351 — The Last Wave III (Bonus)

They killed the last two ordinary Maulers between them over the following six minutes and neither of them was pretty.

`[MAULERS SLAIN ×5]`

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

`[MANA: 1,160 / 3,100]`

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

`[MANA: 1,000 / 3,100]`

Then it was the Great Mauler, on its own, in the middle of a hall full of bodies, with thirty-four thousand hit points and about eleven thousand of them gone.

---

James did not send the last two skeletons at it.

That was the decision he had been making all day and by now he made it without having to think.

He put them where it would have to walk, one on either side, eight metres apart — not in front of it, beside its routes — so that whichever way it went, one of them was on that side and it had to decide whether to deal with the thing on its flank before it did anything else.

Finn went wide left. Ronan went straight at it, slowly, because that was all he had.

Cillian got up on the base of a pillar where he had a line across the whole open floor and no teammates in it.

"Maeve?"

"On you."

It went at Finn.

It covered the ground in three strides and hit him with the flat of a forearm and Finn went five metres and did not get up quickly, and James saw his left arm — the burned one — come down under him wrong when he landed.

Ronan got there.

He did not stop it. He got into its side with the shield and made it turn, and it turned, and its whole back came round to a man standing on the base of a pillar eleven metres away.

"*Cillian.*"

"*I’ve got nothing left.*"

"You’ve got *something*."

Cillian hit it in the back of the head with the smallest thing he had thrown all day and it was enough to make it flinch, and James put both skeletons into the ground behind its heels while it was doing it.

It stepped back into them.

It was a big enough thing that they did not trip it. What they did was stop the step, which meant its weight stayed forward, which meant for about a second and a half it was standing in the open in the middle of a hall leaning the wrong way with its back to a pillar and its front to a Guardian.

Finn came back into it off the floor with one working arm.

He got one axe into the outside of its knee, and Ronan drove the shield rim up under its jaw, and James arrived at the other side with Durendal in both hands and put it through the hide where the old wound had grown back wrong.

`[GREAT MAULER — SLAIN]`

`[EXP GAINED: 7,900]`

`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 41,845 / 78,000]`

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

`[MANA: 1,030 / 3,100]`

---

It came down and the hall went quiet and nobody moved for a while.

James stood where he was and counted to twenty.

Nothing came up out of the floor. Nothing came down off the platform. Nothing at all happened in that hall except five people breathing and one of them badly.

He went to Finn first because Finn was on the ground.

"Arm."

"It’s grand."

"Finn."

"...It’s not grand." He let James get him up. "It’s not broken. I can’t hold anything in it for about a day."

Ronan was standing. That was the whole of Ronan’s condition report and he gave it himself, from eleven metres away, in three words: "I’m still up."

---

James turned toward the throne.

And the Steward stood.

Every one of them moved — Ronan got the shield round, Finn got an axe into his working hand, Cillian put a hand out with nothing in it at all — and James put his own hand on the haft across his back and thought, very clearly, *we cannot do this.*

Not with what was left. Not with Finn’s arm and Ronan’s lung and nothing in Cillian and a thousand mana and two dead skeletons on a floor sixty metres away.

He was going to have to say it out loud in front of three and a half million people.

The Steward did not come down the steps.

He picked the sword up off his knees — for the first time in forty-one minutes — and held it in one hand, point down, and looked at the five of them for about three seconds.

Then he turned round and walked out through the passage behind the throne.

That was all. He did not hurry. The light in the passage took him and he was gone, and the chamber had nobody in it but Team Zero and about forty dead things.

"...What," said Cillian.

---

`[ALL THRONE DEFENDERS ELIMINATED]`

`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE COMPLETE]`

`[FLOOR 36 CLEARED]`

James stood in the middle of it and read that twice.

The objective had been the defenders. It had said so from the first minute, in the first panel, before any of them knew what a defender was going to look like — *clear the throne of its defenders*, and the passage beyond it sealed while any of them remained.

They had done the thing they were asked. The man who had asked it had watched them do it for forty-one minutes and had then got up and left, and the Tower did not consider that a failure on anybody’s part.

"He wasn’t the floor," said Maeve.

"No."

"He was the *door*."

"Yeah," said James.

---

`[COMBAT EXPERIENCE: 14,600]`

`[FLOOR 36 CLEAR REWARD]`

`[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 52,000]`

`[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 60,000 PER MEMBER]`

`[LEVEL UP]`

`[LEVEL: 45 → 46]`

`[ALL STATS +1]`

`[FREE STAT POINTS GAINED: 5]`

`[EXP: 15,845 / 81,000]`

`[SKILL PROFICIENCY UPDATED]`

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — PROFICIENCY INCREASED]`

`[NECRO BLAST — PROFICIENCY INCREASED]`

`[FLOOR MVP — RONAN CLEARY]`

`[REASON: FRONTLINE INTEGRITY MAINTAINED — FIVE ENGAGEMENTS]`

Nothing else. No item, no fragment, nothing under the scythe’s line, nothing new offered for having survived five of anything.

Ten unspent points again, and James did not look at them.

"Five engagements," said Cillian, reading Ronan’s panel. "*Five.* He got hit by every single one of them."

"That’s what it says."

"That’s not a commendation, that’s a *medical chart*."

---

They went up the hall to the platform and no further.

It took longer than it should have. Finn walked. Ronan walked slowly with Maeve beside him not helping him and not moving away either.

The throne was a chair. James had expected something and it was a chair — stone, high-backed, with worn places on the arms where two hands had sat for a very long time.

Behind it, the passage.

It went back into the rock and turned left about fifteen metres in, and there was light in it from somewhere further on, faint, and not red.

And into it, along the base of both walls, went the channels.

All of them. Every cut line that had come up that hall under the flagstones, converging on the platform from a hundred and twenty metres of floor, running up over the lip of it and along both sides of the doorway and through, and the red in them was moving the same direction it had been moving for two floors.

James stood at the threshold and did not step over it.

"Record it," said Maeve.

"I am."

---

He made himself say the three things in his own head, in order, because the last two floors had taught him exactly how easy the fourth one was.

*Alice looked at a carving in a wall and said that man is Wrath, and she is certain, and she does not know why he’s carved there.*

*The channels have run through this fortress since before we arrived and every one of them goes into that passage.*

*The man who sat in that chair for forty-one minutes got up and went in there rather than fight five people who could barely stand.*

That was what he had.

What he did not have was any reason at all to believe that the Steward was Wrath, or that the channels belonged to Wrath, or that the thing carved into a wall two floors above him was standing on the other side of that turn in the corridor.

The Steward had not done one single thing in forty-one minutes that looked like the red. Nothing had knitted. Nothing had been reinforced. He had raised his hand five times and walked out with a sword he never used.

*It’s a route,* James thought. *It’s a route and a direction and a man who went that way. That’s enough to follow. It’s not enough to say who’s at the end of it.*

"Right," he said out loud. "We’re not going in tonight."

"Nobody said we were," said Finn, who had been thinking about it.

"I know you were thinking about it."

"...Yeah."

"We go home, we get looked at properly, we watch the whole of this back, and then we decide." James turned away from the doorway. "Ronan can’t do another one of those tomorrow and neither can you."

Nobody argued.

---

`[FLOOR EXIT SEQUENCE INITIATED]`

`[LIVE BROADCAST ENDING]`

**[ZeroFan]:** HE WALKED AWAY

**[GalwayGoblin]:** FORTY ONE MINUTES AND HE JUST GOT UP AND LEFT

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** RONAN. RONAN CLEARY.

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** five waves. every one a different answer. nobody’s done that before.

**[CorkClimber]:** the channels go in after him. they all go in after him.

**[user88317]:** WHATS DOWN THERE

`[FLOOR EXIT — BROADCAST TERMINATED]`

---

`[FLOOR 37 AVAILABLE]`

`[FLOOR 37 — ENTRY POINT: THE CHAMBER BEYOND THE THRONE]`

James looked at it for a moment with the white already coming up out of the floor around his boots.

Then he looked at the passage one more time — at the turn fifteen metres in, and the faint light past it, and the eleven-odd cut lines running along the walls into the dark with something red going down them at the speed of a man walking.

Somebody had gone that way about four minutes ago.

"Tomorrow," James said, to nobody, and let the floor take them.