Chapter 363 - 354 — The Ruler Beyond the Throne III (Bonus)

Chapter 363: Chapter 354 — The Ruler Beyond the Throne III (Bonus)

He told them.

He did it in about six words and he did it on a live broadcast because there was no version of the next twenty minutes where he hid it from the four people relying on him.

"He’s taken my mana. I’m at nine hundred."

There was a pause of about one second.

"Out of?" said Cillian.

"Three thousand one hundred."

"*Christ.*"

"Can he do it again?" said Ronan, which was the right question.

"I don’t know. Probably." James backed off eleven metres and did not take his eyes off the man. "Nine hundred is fifteen Necro Blasts and that’s the whole of it. I’m not going to have fifteen worth casting, so assume I’ve got about six in me that’ll matter and I’m keeping the rest."

"For what?" said Finn.

"For the last two minutes of this, whenever that is."

He did the sum properly while he said it, because saying it out loud made him honest about it.

Sixty a cast. Nine hundred and twenty in the bank. No corpses on the floor, which meant no Call of Souls, which meant every single point he spent was gone for good — there was no floor under this, no economy, nothing coming back. On Floor 31 he had gone down a thousand in an hour and had been feeding on kills the whole way. Here, the number only went one direction.

"Finn — you’re going to have to hold him a lot longer than you’ve been holding him."

"That’s fine."

"It’s not fine, it’s just what’s happening."

"Same thing," said Finn.

---

The Steward came after the rear line then, because of course he did.

He went for Maeve, at a walk, across open rock, with Ronan eleven metres out of position and Finn still getting back to him — and Ronan got there by doing the only thing available to him, which was to run in a straight line into the man’s path and take whatever happened next.

What happened next was that the Steward stopped and turned his shoulders toward both of them.

"*HOARFROST*," Maeve shouted, which was not its name but was the name Team Zero had for it inside about eleven minutes.

And this time Finn and Ronan did not do what they had done the first time.

They had both watched it twice by then. They knew it came off his left side and went out in a front rather than a line, and that the ground it crossed stopped being ground.

Ronan did not retreat along the line of it. He went *across* it — three strides sideways, out of the arc entirely, rather than backwards down it — and Finn went the other way, and the wave went out across sixty degrees of floor between them and caught neither.

"*Cillian.*"

Cillian had a line the moment the man committed to the cast, because a person putting a wave across sixty degrees of floor is a person who is not facing a hundred metres to the east.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]`

"That’s one of two," he called.

And James spent one — one, measured, at a man who had just planted his feet for something and had not finished.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 860 / 3,100]`

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 75,500 → 69,200]`

Finn was inside before the light cleared.

---

The Steward gave ground for the first time in the fight.

Not a step. Eleven metres, at speed, backwards toward the platform, with Finn following and not being allowed to close.

James understood what that meant about four seconds before anybody said it: they had taken the open floor off him. Every metre back toward the raised circle was a metre where his cold had less room to spread and more of it went into stone that was already there.

"He’s going to the platform," said Maeve.

"Let him."

"James—"

"*Let him.* He’s giving us the middle of the room. I’ll take the middle of the room."

---

They set up on him at the foot of the platform steps and it was the best position Team Zero had held all floor.

Finn and Ronan came at the front, eight metres apart, close enough to support and far enough that nothing hit both of them.

Cillian moved off the shelf at last and came forty metres in, to the second of the low outcrops, which put him at an angle where he could see the Steward’s whole left side and had two tendrils between himself and nothing that mattered.

Maeve took a position behind and to the left, on the clear ground she had walked in on, with the route back to the eastern shelf open behind her and nothing rooted in it.

And James went round to the right, wide, along the base of the platform, to a place where a man defending himself from two axes and a shield was going to have his back three-quarters turned.

He had eight hundred and sixty mana. He had decided on the way round that he was going to spend four hundred of it in the next ninety seconds, because if this position did not produce something then nothing on that floor was going to.

He got to the spot.

Finn forced the exchange. Ronan closed the route. Cillian’s light came in across the man’s left side and the Steward turned into it.

His back came round.

James went.

---

And the Steward’s right hand came off the sword and swept sideways through the air beside him.

Something came with it.

It came out of nothing at all — no ground opening, no light, no sound that James registered — and it was standing four metres to the man’s left before James had covered three strides.

It was him.

Same height. Same dark surcoat over mail, same heavy chain across both shoulders, same short grey beard. Same sword in the same hand.

And the same wounds.

That was the thing James saw and could not stop seeing, in the half-second he had to look at it: the forearm Finn had opened eleven minutes ago was open on that one too, in the same place, bleeding at the same rate. The tear Durendal had put across the surcoat was there. The burn across the shoulder plate where Cillian had first hit him was there.

Every single mark Team Zero had spent nineteen minutes putting on that man was on both of them.

`[THE STEWARD]`

`[FLOOR BOSS]`

`[LEVEL: 66]`

No health bar. Not on either of them. James looked and the number simply was not there anymore.

"*There’s two,*" Cillian said, in a completely flat voice.

---

James knew which one was which for about four seconds.

The original had been at the foot of the steps with its back three-quarters to him. The new one had appeared four metres to its left. He had that, clearly, and he held onto it — *left is the copy, left is the copy* — and then both of them moved.

They went in opposite directions round the base of the platform and one of them passed behind a tendril and came out the other side of it, and James lost it.

He genuinely lost it. Not for long. But by the time he had the two of them in his eyes again they were nineteen metres apart on opposite sides of the approach and he could not have said with any confidence at all which one he had been chasing.

"*Break off,*" he shouted. "Break off, don’t stand together — Finn, Ronan, *split*, don’t let them get you both—"

Finn went left and Ronan went right, which put a Steward in front of each of them.

Cillian came off the outcrop and moved back eleven metres to get both of them inside the same field of view, because a man who has to turn his head is a man who has already lost one of them.

Maeve went straight back along her cleared route to a point where she could see all five of her own people and both of the others, and did not go one metre further than that.

---

"*Which one’s real?*" Finn shouted.

"I don’t know."

"You watched it happen—"

"I *watched it happen* and then one of them went behind a tendril," said James. "I don’t know. Fight both."

---

The one in front of Finn and Ronan turned its shoulders to the left and the air went.

"*WAVE*—"

And at exactly the same moment, on the other side of the approach, nineteen metres away, the second one turned toward the low outcrop where Cillian had been standing and toward James coming round the base of the platform, and raised its left hand.

James saw both of them start.

He saw the front of the cold going out across the floor toward Finn and Ronan on one side, and he saw a hand come up on the other, and he saw the route that Team Zero had been using all fight — the clear ground on the left, Maeve’s road, the way back to the shelf — sitting directly between the two of them.

Anybody who went back that way went into one and turned their back on the other.

Nine hundred mana. Eight hundred and sixty. Fifteen casts if he wanted to be empty in the last two minutes of the hardest fight of the year, and he did not have anything he could throw at a problem twice.

"*Split it,*" James shouted. "Finn, Ronan — off the wave, go *across* it, don’t come back this way. Cillian, on me. Maeve—"

"*Moving.*"

"—*don’t come between them.*"

And then he stopped talking, because the hand on his side of the approach was already coming down.