Chapter 364 - 355 — The False Ruler I

Chapter 364: Chapter 355 — The False Ruler I

James did not go forward.

He had four strides of momentum and a clean line at a man’s back and he threw all of it away, sideways, across the front of the thing on his own side of the approach — because the hand was already coming down and going forward meant going *through* it.

The cold came off it in a front.

He was out of the middle of it and still not out of it. The edge caught his trailing leg below the knee and the rock underneath his boot stopped being rock and became something he could not stand on, and he went down onto his hip and slid four metres.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

The white came across from the low outcrop and hit the duplicate in the side of the head, and it turned.

That was all Cillian had been trying to do. It turned, and it did not follow James across the floor, and James got his feet under him on the far side of the white with his leg working.

Nineteen metres to his left, the other one’s wave went out across sixty degrees at Finn and Ronan.

They went the way James had shouted. Finn went *across* it and Ronan went the other way and both of them came out of the arc, and the wave went between them and put forty metres of chamber floor under glass.

Nobody was hit. Nobody was in a position to do anything about anybody either, which was the whole point of doing it that way.

---

James got up on rock he could not entirely trust and did the arithmetic on the move.

*Two of them. Both can throw that. Two hundred metres of open floor and six tendrils rooted in it.*

The copy was the immediate thing. Not because it was worse — because it was *free*. As long as there were two of them, one of them could be doing something to Finn and Ronan while the other one did something to James and Cillian, and Team Zero would spend the rest of the floor being split in half over and over by a man who did not have to be in two places.

Finding out which was which mattered enormously.

It mattered second.

"Cillian — with me, outer lane, keep six metres off me."

"Six—"

"So it can’t have both of us."

---

They gave ground along the outer lane and the duplicate came after them.

That was worth knowing in itself and James filed it: it was not guarding the platform. It came off the base of the steps and walked out across the open rock toward two people retreating, unhurried, with the sword low.

Maeve was out of their path before James got to her and she went the right way — back and left, along the ground she had walked in on, out of the lane and not into the middle of it.

"Ronan, it’s coming round your rear," she called. "The one on our side, it’s past the platform, it’s coming *behind* you—"

"Heard."

---

"*I can finish that one.*"

Finn, thirty metres away, on his feet, with the frost still coming off his boots.

He meant the one near the structure. He was eleven metres from it and it had just spent a wave and he was probably right.

"*Hold.*"

"James, it’s *right there*—"

"I know where it is. I don’t know *what* it is." James was still backing along the outer lane with the other one coming. "If you commit to that and it’s the copy, you’ve spent yourself on nothing and the real one is behind Ronan. Hold."

Finn held, and did not like it, and was still standing eleven metres from a boss doing nothing when Maeve spoke.

---

"It was the left one."

"Say again?"

"When it appeared. The copy came out on the *left* of the original, and then the original went right, round the platform." Maeve was moving while she said it. "I had both of them for about three seconds."

"And then?"

"And then the wave crossed the hall and I was watching my own feet."

James took it. He took it and he did not build anything on it, because three seconds of clear sight followed by a wall of freezing air across a hundred metres of chamber was exactly the sort of thing that produced a confident wrong answer.

"Useful," he said. "Not proof."

"I know it isn’t proof."

---

He looked at them both anyway, because he had to be sure inspection was dead before he stopped trying it.

The one coming at him along the outer lane had a forearm opened from wrist to elbow, a tear across the front of the surcoat, and a black scorch across the left shoulder plate.

The one standing near the platform in front of Finn had a forearm opened from wrist to elbow, a tear across the front of the surcoat, and a black scorch across the left shoulder plate.

Both of them were bleeding. Both of them were bleeding at the same rate.

*So we’re not doing it by looking.*

"Right," said James. "We’re going to hit them."

"...That was the plan," said Cillian.

"Both of them, once each, and then everybody stops and I look at the numbers."

---

Both panels had been blank since the second one appeared. When Team Zero broke apart and the two of them ended up nineteen metres separated with sustained contact on each, they came back.

`[THE STEWARD]`

`[LEVEL: 66]`

`[HP: 69,200 / 104,000]`

`[THE STEWARD]`

`[LEVEL: 66]`

`[HP: 69,200 / 104,000]`

Identical. Down to the number.

"Oh, that’s cruel," said Cillian.

"Hit it."

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

He put a short one into the duplicate’s chest from eleven metres — a cheap one, the sort of thing he had been throwing at Husk Soldiers for two floors, worth two and a half thousand on a good day.

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 69,200 → 62,800]`

"*Finn. Now.*"

Finn went in on the other one and did what Finn does, which was both axes into the shoulder with his whole weight behind them, and got out before the counter came.

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 69,200 → 66,100]`

---

James stood in the outer lane and looked at two numbers.

Cillian’s strike had been the smaller attack by a distance. He had watched Finn throw that same axe combination into a Horned Champion and take three thousand off it, and he had watched Cillian’s cheap bolts do about a third of that all week.

Cillian’s had taken six thousand four hundred.

Finn’s had taken three thousand one hundred.

"Again," said James. "Cillian, same one, same strike. Don’t make it bigger."

"Same strike."

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 62,800 → 56,700]`

Six thousand one hundred.

James let out a breath.

"That one’s the copy."

"You’re sure?"

"It’s taking twice what it should off the same attack twice in a row. Whatever that thing is, there’s less of it than there is of him." He pointed with Durendal at the figure near the platform, thirty metres away, with Finn standing in front of it. "*That’s* him. That’s the target. Everything goes there."

---

"Then let me put this one down first," said Cillian, immediately. "It’s at fifty-six and it’s soft, I’ll have it in—"

"No."

"James, it’ll take four minutes—"

"It’ll take four minutes we spend not hurting the real one," said James, "and he’ll spend all four of them doing whatever he likes to Finn and Ronan. It’s not the boss. Killing it doesn’t clear the floor and it doesn’t stop him making another one."

There was a short pause, and then Finn’s voice came across the chamber.

"He’s right. Somebody’s going to have to hold it, though."

"I’ll hold it."

Ronan said it from forty metres away in the flattest voice in the room, and nobody argued with him, and it was not James’s decision to make and both of them knew it.

"You won’t kill it," James said.

"I’m not going to kill it. I’m going to be the most annoying thing in this room." Ronan was already walking. "Maeve, I want to know where every one of those tendrils is between me and the east wall."

"Two on your line. One at forty and one at sixty-eight. Everything else is north of you."

"Grand."

---

Ronan took the duplicate off them in about eleven seconds and did it by being closer than anybody else.

He came at it from the north, put himself between it and Cillian, and then hit it once — not hard, on the shield arm, the way you tap a man’s shoulder in a pub — and then backed away into the open lane behind him where there were forty metres of clear rock and two rooted tendrils he knew about.

It came after him.

It came after him because he was four metres away and everyone else was nineteen, and because a thing built to fight cannot walk past something that has just hit it, and Ronan Cleary had been exploiting that specific fact since he was sixteen years old.

He did not try to fight it. He kept eleven metres between them wherever he could, made himself the nearest available problem whenever it looked anywhere else, and every time it set its shoulders for a wave he was already going sideways out of the arc instead of backwards down it.

Twice it turned toward Maeve, and twice he got in front of the route before it took the second step.

---

James went at the real one with Finn, and checked his mana on the way.

`[MANA: 860 / 3,100]`

Fourteen casts. He had done the sum in the throne room and it had not improved: no corpses on the floor, no Call of Souls, nothing coming back, and a number that only went one direction.

*Six. I get six that matter. The rest is a sword.*

He said it to Finn in four words on the way in — "six casts, then nothing" — and Finn said "understood" and did not ask for more.

Cillian moved twenty metres north to a position where he could put a line into the Steward’s left side without Finn or James in it.

Maeve stood where she could see both fights at once, which put her on her own in the middle of two hundred metres of open rock, and she did it without being asked. ℯ

---

The Steward turned to face Finn and set his shoulders.

Finn saw it start.

He had taken that wave twice now and the second time he had watched it come off the man’s left side and go out in a front, and he did not retreat down the line of it. He went *across* — three strides to his own right, out of the arc before it opened — and the cold went past him and put the ground where he had been standing under glass.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

The bolt came in during the commitment, while the man’s weight was still on his front foot from the cast.

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 66,100 → 63,900]`

James got the last eleven metres in that window and put Durendal through the surcoat under the ribs.

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 63,900 → 61,000]`

And the counter came back so fast that James did not block it so much as fail to be entirely where it was going.

The pommel of the sword caught him across the top of the chest plate and he went backwards five metres and down, and when he got up his sternum was one large flat ache and his breathing had gone short.

`[JAMES GANNER — HP: 2,048 → 1,610]`

"*Still dangerous*," Maeve called.

"Thank you, Maeve."

---

The Steward started going back toward the structure.

James saw it on the second step and understood it immediately, because it was the same thing the man had done in the throne room: he was not retreating, he was relocating. Thirty metres behind him the platform rose out of the floor, and clustered around the last forty metres of the approach were four surviving tendrils rooted in the rock.

Anybody who chased him straight in went through them.

"*Finn, don’t follow him in—*"

"I can see them—"

"*North*," Maeve shouted. "Finn, go north — the two on your left are at eleven and nineteen metres, there’s a clear run north of both of them that comes out level with the platform edge—"

Finn went north.

It cost him four seconds and it cost him the direct route, and it meant he arrived at the platform edge at the same time the Steward did instead of eleven metres behind him, which was the entire point.

Cillian hit the man as he turned to deal with Finn coming from a direction he had not planned for.

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 61,000 → 58,400]`

That turn put his side to James, and James came in from the opposite quarter and took it.

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 58,400 → 55,600]`

---

James did not stay. He had learned that in the first exchange and he applied it every time after: get in on the turn, take one, and be gone before the answer arrives.

It was not satisfying. He had spent a year being the man who decided where a fight happened and now he was a man with a sword getting one hit at a time out of an opening somebody else had made.

But it was working.

He could see it working. The Steward had not chosen a target in two minutes — every single thing the man did was an answer to something. Finn made him turn, Cillian made him turn back, James took the side, and he could not get one clean piece of ground to put a wave on because the moment he set his shoulders somebody was already moving across the arc.

*That’s it. That’s the whole fight. Don’t let him pick.*