Chapter 371 - 362 — The Third Relic III (Bonus)

Chapter 371: Chapter 362 — The Third Relic III (Bonus)

`[STONE SLINGER]`

`[LEVEL: 58]`

`[HP: 4,800 / 4,800]`

Six of them along the upper edge, hunched, with a sling arm that came back further than an arm should.

The first stone came down forty seconds in and took a chip out of the route two metres from Ronan.

`[BLIGHTED THRALL]`

`[LEVEL: 59]`

`[HP: 5,200 / 5,200]`

And on the right-hand route, forty metres up, there was a group of five of them standing in a loose cluster and not advancing.

Above that cluster, four metres up and hanging in the air, was a mass of something dark.

It was about the size of a person, and it was not solid, and it was not smoke — it turned slowly, in on itself, with no edges James could fix on. And from the underside of it, thin dark threads went down and touched every single one of the five Thralls standing beneath it.

`[BLIGHTED THRALL]`

`[IMMUNE — BLIGHT ACTIVE]`

"There it is," said James.

---

Finn tested it, once, because somebody had to.

He walked up the right-hand route to eleven metres and put one axe into the nearest Thrall’s shoulder from a standing start — a real strike, not a tap, the sort of thing that took three thousand off a Horned Sentinel.

It landed. James saw it land. The axe head went into the thing’s shoulder and stopped, and there was no wound, and the number under it did not move by one point.

`[BLIGHTED THRALL — HP: 5,200 / 5,200]`

The Thrall turned round and stabbed him.

Finn got out of it with a cut across the forearm and a genuinely offended expression.

"It’s not that it’s tough," he said. "It’s that it isn’t *there*."

---

"Cillian," said James. "Forty metres up the right, the black thing above them. Go and put your jar on it."

"I have to walk *into* the five of them?"

"You have to get near the blight. It’s four metres above their heads, so yes."

"Right," said Cillian. "Right. Grand. Finn—"

"I know," said Finn, and went up the right-hand route ahead of him.

---

It took them about forty seconds and it was the first time on that floor that James understood what he had actually told Finn and Ronan to do.

Finn went in first and did not try to kill anything, because he could not. He walked into five immune creatures with two axes and used them as a crowd — hitting, shoving, turning, keeping four of the five looking at him and none of them looking at the man behind him — and took two more cuts doing it.

Ronan came in on the other side and simply stood in the way of the two on that flank with a shield and no relic and no job except being a wall.

And a stone came down off the upper section and hit the route four feet from Cillian’s shoulder and burst.

"*Slingers*," Maeve called from the entrance floor. "Cillian, they’ve got you — three of them are on you, keep the pillar on your right—"

Cillian kept the pillar on his right and got to eleven metres under the blight and put the Cage up over his head with both hands.

---

The dark thing came apart.

It did not explode and it did not fade. The mass of it simply drew down, all at once, into the hollow sphere of struts in Cillian’s hands — and the small dark ball at the centre of the Cage, which had been floating there touching nothing, was suddenly larger.

Every one of the threads went with it.

`[BLIGHT DRAWN]`

`[BLIGHTED THRALL — IMMUNE — REMOVED]` ×5

Finn hit the nearest one before the light had finished changing.

`[BLIGHTED THRALL — HP: 5,200 → 2,900]`

"*It works*," he shouted, with real feeling. "It works, they’re *there*—"

---

James stood on the entrance floor with a stick in both hands and watched it and had the whole sequence in about four seconds.

*Cillian goes first. Nothing else happens until Cillian goes first.*

The five Thralls were nothing once they could be touched. They were five thousand two hundred apiece with no armour and Finn and Ronan took all of them in about a minute and a half.

And Finn’s instinct, immediately after the last one went down, was to go forward.

"There’s a crossing right here—"

"*Stop.*"

Finn stopped.

"We clear this side first. All of it." James was still watching the upper section, where six Slingers were reloading with perfect patience. "The second we put somebody on one of those platforms, every one of those things up there has a free shot at a man standing on two metres of stone over a hole. We are not doing that until we have to."

"We’ll have to eventually."

"Eventually is not now."

`[BLIGHTED THRALLS SLAIN ×5]`

`[EXP GAINED: 2,200]`

`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 37,685 / 84,000]`

---

`[COUNTDOWN: 00:04:41]`

And then Maeve said, "James," in the voice she used when something had changed and nobody else had seen it.

He looked where she was looking.

Eighty metres away, up the *left-hand* route, a second mass of dark had come into being four metres above a cluster of six more Thralls.

Threads were going down out of the underside of it.

Cillian was on the right-hand route. There were eighteen metres of hole and six Stone Slingers between him and the other side.

`[ACCUMULATING — 14%]`

"And we’re going up again," said James.

"Twelve on me," Maeve said. She was already moving toward the right-hand ramp with the disc up on her arm. "Finn and Ronan are forward and they’ve been in a scrum for three minutes, they’ll be worse than me—"

"Go to them. I’ll take mine."

"You’ll be at forty before I’m back."

"I’ll be at forty and I’ll be *fine* at forty," said James. "Go."

---

She went up the right-hand route and put the dome over Finn and Ronan, and James watched the two of them come out of it clean and immediately start doing the thing he had told them to do without being asked again.

Finn went to the nearest crossing platform and stood at the mouth of it, on the solid side, where he could see up.

Ronan went to the one after it and did the same.

They were not crossing. They were standing at the two places Cillian was going to have to cross from, working out which of them had less sky over it.

"*Left one’s worse,*" Finn called. "Two of the slingers up there have got the whole of it."

"Second one’s better," said Ronan. "There’s an overhang about a third of the way across. You’d be out of sight of four of them for about six metres in the middle."

"Only six?"

"Only six."

---

James stood on the entrance floor with the Lens in both hands and two skeletons standing beside him that he could not add to, because adding to them meant putting a hand on a corpse and he did not have a hand.

`[COUNTDOWN: 00:04:12]`

`[ACCUMULATING — 22%]`

Up on the right-hand route, Cillian was holding a stone cage with a blight in it and looking at eighteen metres of unrailed platform.

Eighty metres away on the other side, six Thralls stood under a dark mass that nothing Team Zero owned could hurt.

Six Stone Slingers waited on the upper section with a clear line onto every crossing in the room.

And somewhere in the next four minutes a Glass Knight was going to come up out of the floor with a shell on it, and the only man in that gallery who could open a shell was standing at the entrance with no sword, no spell and no free hands, waiting for it.

"Cillian," said James. "Second platform. When we go, you go behind Ronan and you do not stop in the middle of it for anything."

"And if something hits me in the middle of it?"

"Then keep going," said James.