Chapter 365 - 356 — The False Ruler II

Chapter 365: Chapter 356 — The False Ruler II

Ronan lost the duplicate.

It happened forty metres away and James only caught the end of it. The copy had been going at Ronan for four minutes and had got nothing, and it changed its mind — it broke off mid-exchange, turned ninety degrees, and went for Maeve, who was standing on her own in the middle of the floor with nothing between her and it.

Ronan got in the route.

He did it the only way available, which was to run into it, and for about a second it worked.

Then it set its shoulders and put a wave straight down the line of him at eight metres.

He got the shield up and got most of himself behind it and it still took him off his feet and slid him eleven metres north on his back, and the route to Maeve was open.

Maeve did not wait for anybody.

She was already moving before Ronan hit the ground — back and left, down the lane she had checked four times and had been standing near deliberately for exactly this, past the tendril at sixty-eight metres on the side she knew was safe, at a dead run.

"*Cillian*," she shouted, "*it’s off Ronan, it’s on me—*"

And Cillian had about a second to decide.

---

He came off the original.

He turned ninety degrees and put a bolt into the duplicate at sixty metres, and then another, and he was not going to hurt it meaningfully at that range with what he had left, and that was not what it was for.

It was for making a thing stop and look somewhere else for four seconds.

It stopped. It looked. Maeve got past the tendril and kept going, and Ronan got up off his back and was into its flank before it turned round.

And thirty metres away, the real one had four seconds with nobody shooting at it.

He used them.

James saw the shoulders go and the man’s whole weight settle, and it was not a wave — it was something with the left hand, low, aimed at Finn’s feet, and Finn was eleven metres out in the open on the north side of the platform with nowhere across to go.

Cillian was facing the wrong way.

*That’s the one.*

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 800 / 3,100]`

James put it into the side of the man’s head at nineteen metres and it did not do a great deal of damage and it did not need to. It arrived while the hand was down and the weight was settled, and the Steward had to abandon the whole thing and move.

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 55,600 → 52,200]`

Finn came off the mark before the light was gone.

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 52,200 → 48,000]`

James was behind him three seconds later with Durendal into the same place.

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 48,000 → 45,300]`

---

"*Back on you,*" Cillian shouted, and the white started coming in again from the north.

Ronan had the duplicate. He had come off the floor and got back in front of it and hit it twice, and it had turned on him, and it stayed turned on him for the rest of the fight because he did not let it do anything else.

"Ronan, have you a road out?"

"I’ve the whole east side."

"Maeve?"

"He’s got the whole east side," she confirmed, from wherever she had ended up. "Nothing rooted north of sixty-eight. He can go back a hundred metres if he needs to."

"Then we finish this one."

---

It took eleven more minutes and there is not a great deal to say about them.

They did the same thing about forty times. Finn made him turn. Cillian hit him during the turn. James came in on the exposed quarter, took one, and left before the answer landed. Maeve called every wave about a second and a half before it went out, and after the first four, nobody was ever standing in the arc.

He was never harmless. He put Finn on the ground twice. He caught James across the shoulder once badly enough that the arm went numb to the fingers for eleven seconds. At one point he simply walked into Finn and put him over with his shoulder and nearly had him.

But he did not get another wave onto anybody, and he did not get back onto the platform, and he did not choose one single target in eleven minutes.

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 45,300 → 11,900]`

James spent two more casts in all of that, both of them to stop something, neither of them for damage.

`[MANA: 680 / 3,100]`

---

At the end he tried for the structure one more time.

He broke contact with Finn entirely — gave up three metres of ground rather than fight for it — and went north-west at speed toward the platform steps with the last four tendrils between him and everybody.

Finn got there first.

He did not out-run him. He cut the corner, because Maeve had spent four minutes telling him where the clear rock was and he had been listening, and he arrived at the foot of the steps two strides ahead of a man who had taken the long way round a rooted tendril.

The Steward stopped, and turned to go round him.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]`

"*That’s the last one,*" Cillian shouted.

It hit him in the middle of the turn and stopped it dead.

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 11,900 → 9,000]`

And James was already coming, wide, from the southern quarter, which he had been drifting toward for about forty seconds.

The Steward saw him at four metres and did the thing he had done every single time somebody got that close, which was the flat brutal counter that had put James on the ground twice — the sword coming across at chest height with the whole body behind it.

James did not try to take it.

He went under it and inside, which he could do now and could not have done in August, on ninety-nine points of Agility and a week of a Fallen Divinity teaching him what being too slow felt like — and the blade went over his back and he came up inside a man’s guard with both hands on a sword.

Finn had the retreat. Cillian had just taken the turn.

There was nowhere for the man to be.

James put Durendal in under the chain, two-handed, and drove it the whole way through.

`[THE STEWARD — HP: 9,000 → 0]`

`[THE STEWARD — SLAIN]`

---

He went down onto his knees first and then onto his side, and he did not say anything, and he did not do anything at all.

Forty metres away, the duplicate stopped mid-swing.

Ronan had the shield up and braced and nothing arrived on it. The copy stood there for about a second with its arm still raised — and then it was not there, all at once, with no sound and nothing left behind on the rock where it had been standing.

The four tendrils went into the floor about two seconds after that, the way water goes down a drain.

And the chamber was quiet.

---

Nobody moved for a while.

Ronan came back across the floor at a walk, which took him about a minute, and the first thing he said when he got there was "Is anybody hurt?" — which was funny enough that Cillian sat down.

Finn had been put on the ground twice and had a set of frost burns up one leg from the very first wave and could still hold both axes.

James’s chest was one flat ache from the sternum out and his right arm had pins and needles in it from the shoulder down.

`[JAMES GANNER — HP: 1,610 / 2,048]`

`[MANA: 680 / 3,100]`

Maeve arrived last, from somewhere out east, entirely unmarked and hoarse.

"How did you know?" she said.

"The numbers." James was still watching the body, because he had watched the Last Defender’s body and had learned something. "Cillian’s small one took twice what Finn’s big one took. There’s less of the copy than there is of him. That’s all it was."

"That’s not *all* it was," said Cillian. "You made us stand still and hit things in order in the middle of a two-front fight."

"It took nine seconds."

"It took nine seconds because you knew what you were looking for."

---

`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE COMPLETE]`

`[FLOOR 37 CLEARED]`

`[COMBAT EXPERIENCE: 26,000]`

`[FLOOR 37 CLEAR REWARD]`

`[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 54,000]`

`[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 62,000 PER MEMBER]`

`[LEVEL UP]`

`[LEVEL: 46 → 47]`

`[ALL STATS +1]`

`[FREE STAT POINTS GAINED: 5]`

`[EXP: 14,845 / 84,000]`

`[SKILL PROFICIENCY UPDATED]`

`[SWORDSMANSHIP — PROFICIENCY INCREASED]`

`[NECRO BLAST — PROFICIENCY INCREASED]`

`[FLOOR MVP — JAMES GANNER]`

`[REASON: HOSTILE DUPLICATE IDENTIFIED — PRIMARY TARGET CONFIRMED]`

"That should be Ronan," said Finn, immediately.

"It should be Ronan," James agreed.

Ronan, who had held a boss on his own for fourteen minutes with nobody watching, said nothing whatsoever and started checking the straps on his shield.

Nothing else came up. No item off the body. No fragment. Nothing new under the scythe, which had not left James’s back all floor.

Fifteen points in a box now, and he did not look at those either.

---

He went to the structure last, because he had wanted to go to it first and had made himself do everything else.

Up close it was worse.

It was thirty metres of something that was not stone and was not metal, standing on a raised circle in the middle of a cut cavern, and the grain in it ran the wrong way — in long twisting courses from the base upward, the way a tree goes, except nothing had ever grown that shape. It was cold. Not cold the way the man’s wave had been cold; cold the way a cellar is cold.

James walked the whole circumference of the platform and did not touch it.

And underneath, the channels were still moving.

That was the thing. He had half expected them to stop. He had not said so to anybody, but somewhere in the back of it he had assumed that killing the man who ran the fortress would do *something* — and the four wide channels going in under that platform from four directions had exactly as much red in them, going exactly as fast, as they had when Team Zero walked in.

He knelt at the southern one and put his eye down to the open section where the cut rock had been left exposed.

A thread of dull red, two fingers wide, going north, under the circle.

It did not come out the other side. He walked round and checked, and none of the four came out anywhere.

---

James sat back on his heels and made himself be accurate.

Alice had looked at a carving in a wall two floors above him and had said, with certainty, that the man in it was Wrath.

The channels had run through every level of that fortress, under the throne, along the passage the Steward walked out of, and into this room, and they went under that structure and did not come out.

And the man who had commanded five waves and fought them for twenty-six minutes was lying on the rock forty metres away, and it had made no difference to the red at all.

So: the phenomenon did not belong to him. It had not stopped when he stopped. Whatever it was doing in this mountain, he had not been the one doing it.

That was a real thing to know and James wrote it down in his head as a real thing.

And that was where it ended. He did not know what the structure was. He did not know whether it was taking the red in or whether the red was simply going past it to somewhere further down. He did not know who had cut the channels, or when, or whether the man in the carving had ever set foot in this room.

*Don’t finish the sentence. You’ve done that twice.*

"Are we opening it?" said Finn.

He was standing at the edge of the platform with an axe still in his hand, looking up thirty metres of black grain.

"Opening what?"

"Whatever that is. You’ve a thing on your back that cuts the red." Finn shrugged. "Thirty minutes. There’s nothing else left in here."

James thought about it properly for about four seconds, which was longer than he wanted to admit.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I’ve six hundred and eighty mana, my chest is broken, you can’t stand on that leg properly, and Cillian’s got nothing at all," said James. "And because I don’t know what that is. If I put the scythe into a channel and it turns out that thing is the only reason the red’s going *down* instead of somewhere else, then I’ve done something to this mountain that I can’t undo, on camera, at the end of a fight I nearly lost."

"Fair."

"We’re not losing it. It’s not going anywhere — it’s been doing that since before anybody in this room was born." He got up, slowly, with a hand on his own chest. "Record it. All four channels, the whole circumference, the base where they go under. Cillian, get the light round the far side."

They spent eleven minutes on it and did not touch one thing.

---

`[FLOOR EXIT SEQUENCE INITIATED]`

`[LIVE BROADCAST ENDING]`

**[GalwayGoblin]:** HE WORKED IT OUT WITH MATHS

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** RONAN HELD A BOSS FOR FOURTEEN MINUTES ON HIS OWN

**[ZeroFan]:** the red’s still going. he killed the fella and it’s STILL GOING

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** so the Steward wasn’t doing it. that’s the whole Chapter. the Steward wasn’t doing it.

**[CorkClimber]:** then who’s doing it

**[user88317]:** WHAT IS THAT THING IN THE MIDDLE

`[FLOOR EXIT — BROADCAST TERMINATED]`

---

`[FLOOR 38 AVAILABLE]`

James stood on a cut rock floor in a cavern with no ceiling, in front of thirty metres of something nobody could name, and let the white come up around his boots.

The man who had sat in the chair was dead and the fortress was theirs and the objective was complete and the Tower had paid them for all of it.

And underneath him, going one direction at the speed of a man walking, the red went on into the mountain exactly as it had been doing the whole time.