Chapter 372 - 363 — Across the Abyss I

Chapter 372: Chapter 363 — Across the Abyss I

Cillian got one foot onto the second platform and a stone came down and took the corner off it.

It burst about a metre from his boot. He came back off the edge onto the right-hand route and put his shoulder against the nearest pillar, breathing hard, with the Cage held against his chest.

"*Nope*," he said. "Nope. They’ve got it."

James looked at the geometry from the entrance floor, forty metres back.

Four platforms across eighteen metres of dark, each one two metres wide with no rail. The second one had an overhang from the upper section about a third of the way across. Six Stone Slingers along the edge of that upper section, thirty metres up, reloading without hurry.

And on the far side, eighty metres up the left route, six Thralls standing under a blight that nothing Team Zero owned could hurt.

"I’ll go first," said Finn. "Draw them."

"You’ll draw two," said Ronan. "They’re at three heights. The ones on the left edge will still have him the whole way."

`[COUNTDOWN: 00:04:02]`

---

James had it in about two seconds.

Finn and Ronan could kill anything in that gallery that could be killed. It did not matter. Until Cillian was standing under that blight, the six Thralls on the far side could not be touched, the Keepers behind them would not come, and the clock would go on falling while the two best fighters in Ireland stood about waiting for something to do.

*He’s the objective. Everything else is a road for him.*

He brought the Lens up at the Slinger furthest left on the upper edge — the one with the cleanest line down the second platform — and held it there.

The pale line went up thirty metres and the Slinger came off the edge.

`[STONE SLINGER — SLAIN]`

"One," said James. "Finn, go. Ronan, stay on Cillian. Maeve—"

"I’m at the mouth of it," she said. She was already there, at the head of the second platform, with the disc up. "Anybody who’s going across comes through me first."

---

Finn went across the second platform at a dead run.

It was two metres wide and eighteen long and there was nothing on either side of it but air. He did not look down. He went through Maeve’s dome at the head of it, came out clean, and was under the overhang in four strides with three Slingers turning to follow him.

Which was what he was for.

The overhang took four of them off him. The other two had him for the last six metres, and one stone came down at his heels as he jumped the final gap onto the far route and burst behind him, and he went down flat on the landing rather than come up into a second one.

"*Down, I’m down, I’m fine—*"

Ronan came across behind him — slower, heavier, with the shield up over his head at an angle — and got off the end of the platform and straight into the nearest of the two Thralls that had come to see what had arrived. He took it on the shield and turned it away from Finn.

Finn got up.

`[STONE SLINGER — SLAIN]`

"*Two*," said James.

---

`[COUNTDOWN: 00:03:31]`

Cillian started across.

He had waited on the right-hand route for the whole of that, and it had cost him. James could see it from forty metres — the way Cillian was carrying his head, tilted, the way people carry it when something is crowding in at the edges.

`[ACCUMULATING — 51%]`

Cillian’s was over fifty. James’s own was at thirty-eight.

Maeve saw it at the same moment and looked at James — one look, across forty metres of gallery, asking.

She could go with Cillian across the platform, which would put the Ward over him the whole way, and would put James outside it for as long as it took.

"Him," said James. "Go."

"You’re at—"

"Thirty-eight. He’s at fifty-one and he’s carrying the only thing that makes this room work. If he stops on that platform we lose more than I do."

She was already moving.

---

She went four metres out onto the second platform behind Cillian and put the dome over both of them, and James watched him straighten up inside it as the edges cleared.

`[ACCUMULATING — 51% → 0%]`

Then he went — through the shadow of the overhang, past the six metres where two Slingers still had him, with Maeve four metres behind and Finn and Ronan waiting on the far side — and a stone came down between him and Maeve and burst and neither of them stopped.

He came off the end of the platform onto the left-hand route and did not stop there either.

Six Thralls. One blight, hanging four metres over them, turning in on itself.

Finn went into the middle of the six so that Cillian did not have to. Ronan took two on the outside.

Cillian put the Cage up over his head.

`[BLIGHT DRAWN]`

`[BLIGHTED THRALL — IMMUNE — REMOVED]` ×6

Finn’s axe went through the first one’s shoulder and came out the other side.

---

James came across with his vision closing in at the edges and his own number at fifty-four, and Maeve was waiting for him at the landing with the disc already up, and he walked into the dome and it went.

`[ACCUMULATING — 54% → 0%]`

"You said thirty-eight," she said.

"I was thirty-eight when I said it."

---

The first pair of Keepers came off the left route inside forty seconds and died on opposite sides of a stone rise, one each, and nobody in Team Zero stood still for either of them.

`[COUNTDOWN: 00:02:22]`

Finn called his column without being asked. "Wedge, open eye, three-bar."

James was already looking at the other one through the Lens. "Spiral, open eye, broken ring."

"Open eye," said Maeve.

That was all of it. Four seconds, three people, no argument.

---

James had turned away from the columns before Maeve finished the word, because he had been waiting for what came after the first pair since the room opened.

He found it on his second sweep.

It was not on either route. There was a single small platform in the dead centre of the gap, about four metres square and connected to nothing, hanging over the dark halfway between the two routes — and standing on it, in a close-fitted shell, was a Glass Knight.

`[GLASS KNIGHT]`

`[LEVEL: 64]`

`[HP: 9,800 / 9,800]`

"*Middle*," he said. "In the gap. I need an angle."

He could not get one from where he was. The rise between the two Keeper positions was in the way.

He went to the edge of the route — right to the lip of it, with eighteen metres of dark going straight down under his boots and two skeletons coming up behind him — and leaned out.

`[COUNTDOWN: 00:02:07]`

The first beam took the shell apart. The second one killed it.

`[GLASS KNIGHT — SLAIN]`

`[+00:01:00]`

`[COUNTDOWN: 00:03:07]`

---

Maeve had them all inside the dome by the time he came back from the edge.

`[ACCUMULATING — 0%]` ×5

And James looked up the gallery.

The two routes climbed again from here, and the gap between them narrowed but did not close. Further up, both routes were busy — more Thralls, two more Slingers on a secondary ledge — and there were two more blights. One hanging over a group on the right-hand route about sixty metres ahead. One on the left, further, off to the side of the main line on a spur of rock.

Cillian started toward the nearer one.

"*Don’t*," said Finn.

Cillian stopped.

"You go on your own again and we’re back where we were. Two minutes of you pinned and the rest of us standing about." Finn pointed up the right-hand route. "We go up together."

"All of us on one side?"

"All of us on one side," said James. "Until you’ve got cover to go sideways from. Finn and Ronan in front, Cillian behind them, Maeve on Cillian, me at the back watching the middle."

"Why the middle?"

"Because that’s where the clock comes from."

---

It was faster, and James could feel it.

Finn and Ronan went up the right-hand route shoulder to shoulder. Cillian stayed two strides behind them. Maeve stayed inside five metres of all three, which meant nobody’s number got over thirty. James walked at the back with the Lens on the centre platform.

Twice, a Slinger on the secondary ledge got a line on Cillian. Both times James put it back into cover before it threw.

`[STONE SLINGERS SLAIN ×2]`

The right-hand blight took Cillian eleven seconds to reach from behind a moving wall, and the four Thralls under it died about forty seconds after that.

`[BLIGHT DRAWN]`

---

The fourth blight was on the spur.

It was off to the left of the route on a ledge of rock that stuck out over the gap, and there was no reaching it without leaving the group.

Ronan went with Cillian without being told.

He did not look at James for permission. He saw that the spur had exactly one way on and one way off, and went.

Cillian drew the blight.

And the Keeper that had been standing under it, suddenly vulnerable, did not go for Cillian. It went for the neck of the spur — the one narrow way back to the main route — and got its body into it, and turned round.

It had not been guarding the blight. It had been waiting to cut off whoever came for it.

Ronan was already there.

He had seen it start to turn and had moved on the turn, not the step, and he met it in the neck of the spur with the shield square and stopped it dead with Cillian and the Cage behind him and eighteen metres of nothing on both sides.

"Go on," said Ronan. "Round me."

Cillian went round him.

---

Behind them, on the main route, Finn held four Thralls away from Maeve on his own, and James put the Lens on anything that came off the upper ledge, and the dark came in at the edges of everybody’s vision again.

Maeve did not go after anyone.

She stayed where she was, with Finn and James, and waited.

`[ACCUMULATING — 44%]`

When Ronan and Cillian came back off the spur she put the disc up once and all five of them were inside it.

`[ACCUMULATING — 0%]` ×5

"That’s better than chasing," she said.

"That’s better than chasing," James agreed.