Chapter 370 - 361 — The Third Relic II

Chapter 370: Chapter 361 — The Third Relic II

"*Left one’s down,*" Cillian shouted, from the other side. "And I can read mine, I’m not holding anything — crescent, ring-with-a-cross, three-bar."

"Say it again."

"Crescent. Ring with a cross in it. Three-bar."

And Ronan said, "Ring with a cross, spiral, wedge."

"Cross-in-circle," said Maeve. "That’s the second one. Broken ring and cross-in-circle."

"You’re certain?"

"Broken ring from the first pair, cross-in-circle from this pair, and nothing else appears in both." She was already moving. "Two marks. Tell Cillian both of them now so he’s not learning them at the door."

---

`[COUNTDOWN: 00:00:51]`

The second shielded one came up near the far end of the left-hand route, and it came up in the worst place available.

"I’ve got it," said Finn. "I’ve — no. No, I haven’t. There’s a step in the way, I’m looking at the top of its head."

"Move."

"If I move forward I lose the angle entirely, the block’s in—"

"*Back and left,*" said Cillian. "Finn, come back eleven metres and go left along the outer wall. There’s a gap between the pillar and the step and you can see the whole of it from there — I’m looking at it now."

"You’re sure?"

"I’m standing in it."

Finn came back eleven metres, which cost him about six seconds he did not want to spend, and Cillian moved out of the gap and put two bolts into the Glass Knight’s face to make it look somewhere else while he did it.

The pale line came through the gap.

`[GLASS KNIGHT — SLAIN]`

`[COUNTDOWN: 00:00:38]`

`[+00:01:00]`

`[COUNTDOWN: 00:01:38]`

---

They came onto the landing from both sides at once and the door was there.

Fifteen marks in three rows of five, exactly like the one below, cut into pale stone.

Cillian did not need to be told anything. He was already looking at the grid with a hand up.

"Broken ring — top row, second from the left. Cross-in-circle — bottom row, middle."

"Both."

"Both, yeah."

He hit them in that order, about a second apart, and each one lit as it took the bolt and stayed lit, and when the second one came up the other thirteen went out together and the door came apart down the middle and went into the walls.

`[COUNTDOWN: 00:01:21]`

"*Go.*"

---

James got one stride into the antechamber and stopped dead with his arm out, which stopped Finn behind him.

The floor was moving.

There were seven of them and they were about the size of a large dog, and they had no legs that James could see — they came along the stone in a low waddling heave, bloated, with a taut grey skin stretched over something that was visibly under pressure. No eyes. No weapons. No arms.

They were coming across the chamber toward the doorway, between Team Zero and two pedestals at the far end.

`[BLOAT]`

`[LEVEL: 50]`

`[HP: 900 / 900]`

"Those are nine hundred hit points," said Finn. "I’ll have the lot in—"

"*Don’t.*"

"Why?"

"Because nothing on any floor looks like that and is meant to be hit," said James. "Cillian. From here."

---

Cillian put a short bolt into the nearest one from eleven metres inside the doorway.

It came apart.

Not killed — *detonated*, with a flat crack and a pressure that James felt on his face from the doorway, and a circle of the floor about four metres across went black. The Bloat two metres behind it went up in the same instant from the edge of the blast and took a third one with it.

Three of them, from one bolt, in about a second and a half.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"Right," said Finn, in a slightly different voice. "So I’d have been standing in the middle of that."

"You’d have been standing in the middle of that."

They cleared the other four from the doorway and took about twenty seconds doing it, and none of them set foot in the chamber until the last one was a black mark on the floor.

`[BLOATS SLAIN ×7]`

---

The pedestals were at the far end and there were three of them.

Finn put the Lens in the first cradle. Ronan put the Ward in the second.

`[RELIC DEPOSITED]`

`[RELIC DEPOSITED]`

`[COUNTDOWN RESET]`

The numbers went off everybody’s vision at once and the chamber got very quiet, and Cillian sat down on the floor with his back against a pedestal.

`[JAMES GANNER — HP: 1,780 / 2,048]`

`[MANA: 2,720 / 3,100]`

`[GALLERY KEEPERS SLAIN ×4]`

`[GLASS KNIGHTS SLAIN ×2]`

`[GALLERY THRALLS SLAIN ×18]`

`[BLOATS SLAIN ×7]`

`[EXP GAINED: 14,040]`

`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 35,485 / 84,000]`

No clear reward. There was another door.

---

Maeve went round everybody and it was a short list.

Finn had a maul across the ribs from the first pair and a burn on his palms from holding the Lens for eleven minutes, which nobody had expected and which he said stung more than the ribs. Ronan had not been hit once, because Ronan had spent the entire gallery being somewhere else on purpose. Cillian had shot a Bloat from eleven metres and was fine and was sitting down anyway. James had a shallow cut across the outside of the left arm from a Thrall he never saw.

"Second half of that went better," said Finn.

"It did."

"It went better because we stopped making him run after whoever had gone furthest." He nodded at Ronan. "We lost about forty seconds coming down to the junction twice and we’d have lost two minutes the other way."

"You said it was giving up ground."

"I did say that."

"And?"

"And I was wrong and I’m saying so once," said Finn, "so don’t get used to it."

Ronan was looking at the door they had not opened yet.

"There won’t be a junction in the next one," he said.

"You don’t know that."

"I know there won’t always be one," said Ronan. "And if there isn’t, whoever’s carrying that disc is going to have to pick a group and let the other one climb."

Nobody had an answer to that, which was the correct response.

---

The third pedestal was not empty.

James went and looked at it.

The thing in the cradle was about the size of a dinner plate and nothing like the other two — not a shaft and not a disc, but a cage. A sphere of pale stone struts about thirty centimetres across, hollow, with a grip worked into the underside, and inside it, held at the centre and touching nothing, a second small sphere of something dark that did not appear to be attached to anything at all.

When James tilted his head the dark thing stayed where it was.

`[RELIC — THE CAGE]`

`[DRAWS AND HOLDS THE BLIGHT]`

`[BEARER MUST CLOSE WITH THE BLIGHT]`

That was all it said. Four words of instruction and a warning.

"What’s a blight?" said Cillian.

"We’ll know in about a minute," said James.

---

"Right," said Finn, and reached for the Lens.

`[RELIC — THE LENS]`

`[BEARER RESTRICTED — 00:15:00]`

His hand stopped a centimetre off it.

"Ah."

"Both of you," said James. "You put them down, you’re locked out of everything for fifteen. Which means it’s me, Maeve and Cillian carrying."

He took the Lens, which meant no sword and no casting for the next room, and felt the weight of that in a very literal sense.

Maeve took the Ward and got her arm through the grip and had it up and down twice inside four seconds, testing.

And Cillian got the Cage off the third pedestal and held it at arm’s length like a man holding a wasp in a jar.

"This is going to want me to walk *at* something, isn’t it."

"’Bearer must close with the blight,’" said James.

"That’s what I thought it said."

---

James stood and looked at the five of them and did the arithmetic that mattered.

Three of the five had jobs now.

He was carrying the only thing in the room that could break a shell, which meant he was the clock. Every minute Team Zero got out of a Glass Knight came off him, and he could not be in a scrum when one appeared.

Maeve was carrying the only thing that cleared the dark, which meant she had to physically be next to whoever was drowning in it, repeatedly, on a floor with two separated routes.

Cillian was carrying something that required him to walk up to a thing nobody had seen yet.

And none of the three of them could hold a weapon while doing it.

"Finn. Ronan."

"Go on."

"You two are not fighting to kill things in this room," said James. "You’re fighting so that the three of us can get where we’re going. If there’s a choice between putting something down and keeping Cillian’s road open, the road wins. Every time."

"Even if we could finish it," said Finn.

"Even if you could finish it. We’ve got a quarter of an hour of combat power in this team and none of it matters if he can’t reach whatever it is."

"Right," said Ronan.

"And that changes the second the relics pull us apart, which they will, so nobody get attached to the plan."

---

They opened the passage.

The third gallery had a hole in the middle of it.

That was the first thing and it changed everything. Two elevated routes, one left and one right, running away from the entrance — and between them, from the entrance wall to the far end, a gap.

It was about eighteen metres across and James could not see the bottom of it. The light from the routes went down about twenty metres and stopped.

Four narrow stone platforms crossed it. They were spaced along the length of the gap at irregular intervals, each one maybe two metres wide with no rail of any kind, and they were the only way from one route to the other.

At the far end, both routes climbed to an upper section that ran the whole width of the room, and in the back wall of it was a door.

And there were enemies on both routes, and — worse — there were enemies on the upper section, thirty metres up and a hundred metres away, standing at the edge with a clear line down onto every crossing platform in the room.

`[COUNTDOWN: 00:06:00]`

"Oh, that’s *horrible*," said Cillian.