Chapter 362 - 353 — The Ruler Beyond the Throne II

Chapter 362: Chapter 353 — The Ruler Beyond the Throne II

At the eight-minute mark he changed it.

He stepped back three metres, put the sword point down on the rock again — which Team Zero read as a pause, wrongly — and put his left hand flat on the floor.

The rock came apart in six places.

They came up out of the cut stone the way Fossor came up out of dirt, except they did not come out of it and go anywhere. Each one was a thick grey-black limb about as far through as a man’s waist, two and a half to three metres tall, rooted in the floor where it had broken through, and they came up all over the chamber.

Two behind Finn. One eleven metres behind Ronan. One out on the left, directly across the line Maeve had walked in on. One near the base of the shelf below Cillian.

And one four metres from James.

`[SUMMONED TENDRIL]`

`[LEVEL: 60]`

`[HP: 4,000 / 4,000]`

It hit him before he finished reading the panel — a flat sideways sweep that he got Durendal into and which still moved him two metres and left his forearm ringing.

Then it went still.

James backed off four metres and it did not follow.

He backed off another two and it stayed exactly where it was, swaying very slightly, rooted in the floor it had broken out of.

"*They don’t move*," he shouted. "They’re fixed — they can’t leave the spot—"

"That one nearly took my head off," said Cillian.

"Then don’t stand beside it."

---

He killed the one nearest him, which took eleven seconds and cost him a cut across the back of the hand, and then he did the thing he had been thinking about since it came up.

He put his palm on it.

Nothing.

There was no answer at all — not a refusal, not a resistance, just the complete absence of the thing James had felt from every dead body he had touched since he was seventeen. It was not a corpse. It had never been alive in the way the word meant when he used it.

He tried the other thing too, quickly, because it cost nothing to try, and there was no corpse there for that either.

*Right. That’s confirmed.*

"No bodies," he said, out loud, for the team and for four million people. "The tendrils don’t count. I’m not getting anything off them and I’m not getting anything off him until he’s down. Nobody wait for me to put something in the way."

"So you’ve nothing all floor," said Maeve.

"I’ve a sword and a spell."

---

And for about three minutes Team Zero did exactly the wrong thing, which was to try and clear them.

It was completely understandable. Cillian went after the one at the base of the shelf because it was under his firing position. Ronan went at the one behind him because it was behind him. Finn broke off the Steward to take the two nearest him, because two tendrils behind a man who has to retreat through that ground is a genuine problem.

And every single second any of them spent on a tendril was a second the Steward spent doing whatever he liked.

He put two more up while they were working. He walked across the chamber and re-established himself in the open ground where his cold would carry furthest. He put a wave across the floor at Ronan while Ronan had his back to him, and only did not hurt him because Maeve saw it coming and shouted.

James watched thirty seconds of that and stopped it.

"*Leave them.*"

"There’s one right—"

"Leave them, Cillian. All of you." He was already moving. "He’s putting them up faster than we’re taking them down and every one you kill is fifteen seconds you’ve given him. Clear the ones in your way and *walk round the rest*."

"And when one of them hits me?"

"Then you were standing beside it."

---

It worked, and the proof was on the panel.

Team Zero stopped chasing. Cillian moved eleven metres along the shelf to a firing position with nothing rooted near it and stayed there for the rest of the fight. Maeve went the long way round the one on the left and never went near it again. Ronan simply accepted that there was a thing behind his right shoulder for the next six minutes and worked with it there.

And Finn went back to the Steward and did not leave him again.

Four minutes after that the Steward was down another nine thousand and had spent the whole four minutes defending, and two of the tendrils James had told everybody to ignore had killed nothing and threatened nobody.

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 91,800 → 82,600]`

The third one nearly took Finn’s arm off when he backed into its reach without looking, which was the entire argument for having killed them all, and which did not change the arithmetic.

"Noted," said Finn, from the floor, again.

---

The fight moved them toward the centre and James got his first close look at the channels.

They ran under the cut rock the way they had run under everything else in that mountain, and forty metres from the platform they stopped being separate. What had come in from the walls as dozens of narrow lines had joined and joined again, and by the edge of the platform there were only four of them left, and each of those was as wide as a road.

They went under the raised circle. All four.

He got eleven seconds to look at it while Ronan held the Steward off a bad angle, and what he got out of eleven seconds was this: the red went in, and it did not come out anywhere on that floor, and the enormous black thing standing on the platform was directly over the place where all of it arrived.

That was all. He did not know what the structure was. He did not know that it was taking anything. He had four wide channels going under a thing he could not identify and no reason at all to connect either to a face carved in a wall two floors up.

He put the location in the log and went back to work.

---

They pushed him off the centre at the fourteen-minute mark and it was the best two minutes Team Zero had.

Finn forced him into a close exchange and would not let it end. Ronan got round behind and stood on the route back to the platform, which meant every backward step the man took was a step into a Guardian. Cillian hit him twice while he was changing his feet.

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 82,600 → 75,500]`

And James came in from the left with a clean line at a man who was committed forward, with his sword arm on the wrong side and nothing between them.

He got four strides in.

Then the Steward turned his head, and looked at him, and put his left hand out.

---

It was nothing like the cold.

There was no wave and no front and nothing crossed the floor. James saw the hand come up and then something hit him in the chest that did not move him at all — no impact, no heat, no pain, just a sensation like standing up too fast.

He kept his feet. He did not stop moving. For about a second he thought it had missed.

Then he looked at the corner of his vision.

`[MANA: 920 / 3,100]`

James stopped dead on open rock in the middle of a fight.

*That’s not right.*

He had been at two thousand eight hundred. He had cast four times in eighteen minutes because there had been nothing worth casting at and no corpses to spend on, and he had been sitting on nearly three thousand mana like a man with money in the bank.

One thousand eight hundred and eighty of it was gone in the time it took a man to raise his hand.

"*James.*" Maeve. "James, you stopped, *why did you stop*—"