Chapter 361 - 352 — The Ruler Beyond the Throne I

Chapter 361: Chapter 352 — The Ruler Beyond the Throne I

James watched the last ninety seconds of Floor 36 eleven times.

Not the waves. The end of it — the Steward getting out of the chair, the sword coming up off his knees for the first time in forty-one minutes, three seconds of looking at five people who could barely stand, and then the walk.

He paused it where the man went into the passage.

Then he scrubbed forward four frames to the thing he actually kept coming back to, which was the floor: eleven cut channels running up over the lip of the platform, along both sides of the doorway, and through.

They had gone in after him. Or he had gone in after them. There was no way to tell which from a recording and James had watched it eleven times looking.

"You’ve had that on since half seven," said Maeve.

"I have."

"Have you got anything out of it?"

"No," said James, and closed it.

---

They had three days, which was mostly the armoury.

Ronan’s shield came back with the face replaced and the boss rebuilt and got a new strap into the bargain. Finn’s left pauldron was scrapped entirely. Two of James’s coat panels were replaced and the armourer said something about the whole thing that James did not entirely catch and did not ask him to repeat.

Maeve made everybody get looked at. Ronan’s arm had come back in the Waiting Room the way everything came back in the Waiting Room, and she made him go to a person anyway, and the person said what the Waiting Room always made people say, which was that there was nothing wrong with him and he should stop asking.

On the third morning they sat round the table for eleven minutes and that was the whole of the planning.

"He’ll fight us this time," said Finn. "He’s out of waves. He’s had five goes at it and he’s got nothing left to put in front of him, so he’ll do it himself."

"That’s an assumption," said Ronan.

"It’s a fair one."

"It’s still an assumption, and I’d rather see the room before we commit to anything." Ronan turned his hand over. "We walked into the throne hall and took a position in the first eleven seconds and then spent forty minutes being moved out of it. I’d like to know what the floor looks like before we decide where we’re standing."

"And we don’t know what he can do," said Maeve.

Both of them looked at her.

"He sat in a chair for forty-one minutes. He raised his hand five times." She spread her fingers. "That’s every single thing we saw. We have no idea whether that was him fighting, or him not bothering, or him doing the only thing the throne room let him do."

---

James had his own version of it and he did not say most of it out loud.

The man had five groups die for him. Two of those had been genuinely dangerous — the last one had put Ronan on his back twice — and he had watched every one of them fail and had never got out of the chair.

And then, with Team Zero standing in the middle of his own hall barely able to hold a weapon between them, he had got up, picked up a sword, looked at them, and left.

*That was the moment.* That had been the moment for anybody who wanted them dead, and he had not taken it.

James could think of three reasons for that and he did not know which one was true.

He could have been beaten — a man who had spent everything he had on five waves and had nothing behind it.

He could have been obeying something. A floor, a rule, an order. Something that said the throne was as far as he went.

Or he could have been walking to a place he would rather do it in.

James was not going to pick one of those in a briefing room, and he said so, and Finn accepted it with visible reluctance.

"Enter ready," James said. "Don’t charge him."

---

He did the other check on his own, the night before, which took about four minutes and was the least pleasant part of the three days.

Alice was staying. He had not asked and she had not offered and by now that was simply the arrangement.

Fossor needed ground. He had watched it drag itself through sixty centimetres of rubble fill under flagstones on Floor 35 and stop dead at the base of a pillar, and the throne hall’s floor had been dressed stone laid straight onto the mountain. Whatever was on the other side of that passage was going to be cut out of the same rock. ℴ

And there were no bodies.

That was the one that got him. He went through it twice hoping to be wrong. There had been forty-odd corpses on the floor of the throne room and every one of them was on Floor 36, and Floor 37 started with five people, one man in a surcoat, and whatever stone he was standing on.

No corpses meant no skeletons. No skeletons meant no screen, no flank obstruction, and nothing to walk into a lane.

And no skeletons and no corpses meant no Grave Step.

James sat with that one for a minute. He had had an anchor within reach on every floor he had climbed since Floor 14. He was going to walk into the hardest fight of the year with a sword, a spell that cost sixty, and a broken scythe he had already decided he was not spending on a man in a coat.

*So it’s swordsmanship and one spell.*

He had spent most of a year building an army out of whatever a floor gave him.

This one was going to give him nothing.

---

`[TEAM ZERO — PARTY CONFIRMED]`

`[JAMES GANNER — FINN HALE — MAEVE CALLAHAN — RONAN CLEARY — CILLIAN WARD]`

`[CHALLENGERS: 5 / 5]`

`[REANIMATED — ACTIVE]`

`[ANATHEMA — BOUND — NOT TRANSFERRING]`

`[LIVE BROADCAST ACTIVE — REGION: IRELAND]`

`[VIEWERS: 4,109,336 ▲]`

`[FLOOR 37 ENTRY CONFIRMED]`

---

The chamber on the other side was the biggest thing James had ever stood in.

It went up. That was the first impression and it did not change — the throne hall had been long and low and built for people, and this was a cavern that somebody had squared off, two hundred metres across and going up into a dark that had no ceiling in it at all.

The floor was one piece. Not flagged. Cut — the living rock of the mountain, levelled and smoothed and left, with the tool marks still visible in it if you got close enough.

They had come out on a shelf at the eastern end, with the passage behind them and four shallow steps down onto the main floor.

There was almost nothing in it.

That was the thing that made Ronan swear quietly. No pillars. No side chambers. Three or four low outcrops of stone left standing where the floor had not been cut all the way down, none of them more than chest height, scattered across two hundred metres — and apart from those, the whole of it was open.

In the middle, on a raised circular platform about forty metres across, stood the structure.

James did not have a word for it.

It went up out of the platform for thirty metres and it was made of something that was not stone and was not metal — dark, close to black, with a grain in it like something that had been grown rather than built, narrowing as it rose and then opening out again near the top into a shape he could not resolve from two hundred metres away. It did not glow. It did not hum.

It was simply there, in the middle of a mountain, and everything in the room had been cut around it.

And under the floor, converging on the platform from every direction James could see, were the channels.

Dozens of them. Not eleven — dozens, running in from the walls, from behind, from the passage Team Zero had just walked out of, all of them going toward the raised circle and under it.

---

The Steward was standing at the foot of the platform steps.

He had been waiting. There was no other way to read it. He was thirty metres out from the structure, facing the eastern shelf, with the sword in his right hand point-down on the rock and both hands resting on the pommel, and he had been standing like that long enough that he did not shift when five people came out of the passage.

Same man. Dark surcoat over mail, grey beard cut short, the heavy chain across both shoulders.

Not winged. Nothing behind his head.

`[THE STEWARD]`

`[FLOOR BOSS]`

`[LEVEL: 66]`

`[HP: 104,000 / 104,000]`

`[FLOOR 37]`

`[FLOOR CLASSIFICATION: STORY FLOOR]`

`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: DEFEAT THE STEWARD]`

"Spread out," said James. "All of you. Nobody within six metres of anybody else."

"Why six?"

"Because we’ve never seen him do anything and I’d rather find out with one of us in it."

---

Finn went down the steps to the left and Ronan to the right, and the two of them came onto the floor forty metres apart and started closing at an angle.

Cillian stayed on the shelf, which gave him two metres of height and a line across the whole floor.

Maeve came down last and stopped twenty metres in, behind everybody, where she could see all four of them and the room.

James went down the middle with Durendal out and did not hurry.

The Steward watched all of it.

At sixty metres he took the sword off the rock.

At forty he turned his shoulders toward Finn, and something happened to the air.

"*MOVE*—"

It came off him in a wave.

Not a beam, not a bolt. A broad front of cold that went out from his left side across about sixty degrees of the floor and kept going, and where it crossed the cut rock the surface went white and stayed white.

Finn changed direction and did not get out of it.

He got out of the middle of it. The edge caught him from the hip down and he went over — not knocked down, *stopped*, his leading foot losing everything it had on rock that had gone to glass in front of it — and he slid five metres on his side and came up with his left leg not working properly for about four seconds.

Ronan was already crossing to that side. He came round the outside of the white and put himself between Finn and the Steward, which was the correct thing to do and cost him twelve metres of the approach he had been building.

`[HOARFROST]`

"It’s *cold*," Finn shouted, from the ground, with considerable feeling.

"Thank you, Finn."

---

James had four strides of clear floor and a man with his weight on his left side and both frontliners out of position.

He did not take it.

He worked it out in about half a second and it was not a difficult sum. Thirty metres of open rock, no cover, nothing to Grave Step to, Finn on the ground and Ronan facing the wrong way — and at the end of it a man who had just demonstrated he could put a wall of that across sixty degrees.

*If I go now I’m alone in front of him for eleven seconds.*

He stopped where he was and used the only thing he had that worked at range.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 3,040 / 3,100]`

It hit the Steward across the chest and took him back a step.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

And from the shelf, at a hundred metres, Cillian put a white line into his shoulder from an angle nobody was standing in.

The Steward turned to deal with both of them.

Which gave Finn eleven seconds to get his leg back and Ronan eleven seconds to walk him forward, and that was what those two casts had been for.

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 104,000 → 97,200]`

---

After that they found the rhythm, and it was a good one, and it held for about six minutes.

Finn went at him. That was the whole first part of it — Finn Hale closing to two metres with both axes and making a man with a sword deal with a man with two axes, which meant the Steward had to choose a direction, and every time he chose one he stopped being able to look anywhere else.

Ronan did not fight him at all. Ronan stood on whichever side Finn would have to retreat through and kept it open.

Cillian took him every single time he turned.

And James came in on the diagonal with Durendal when the man’s weight was committed and left when it was not, which was a thing he had been able to do for about eleven months and had got extremely good at in a padded hall in August.

The Steward was good. James had expected that and it was still unpleasant to have confirmed — he fought the way the Last Defender had fought, economically, with a great deal of small correct movement and nothing wasted, and twice he simply walked backwards out of a position Team Zero had spent forty seconds building rather than stay in it and be surrounded.

But he bled.

That was the important thing and James made a point of noticing it. There was no red on him. Nothing knitted. When Finn opened his forearm the forearm stayed open, and when Durendal went through the surcoat and into the mail underneath it, the man moved afterwards like somebody who had been cut.

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 97,200 → 91,800]`

"He’s just a man," said Finn, at one point, breathing hard, on the way past.

"He’s a man with a hundred thousand hit points."

"He’s a *man*, James. I’ve fought worse."