Chapter 127 - 125 — No Protection III (Bonus)

I went and looked and there are a great many of those in that section.

Not most. But enough that I stopped opening the profiles after the fourth one, because the profile shows you the last thing they posted and the last thing is always about logistics.

Somebody asking whether anyone has a spare harness in a size. Somebody complaining about the price of draughts. Somebody saying he will be off the board for a week.

---

One team got closest before the clear.

They went in eight years ago, came out with two, and posted a long account in which they had worked out that the contradictory descriptions came from two coexisting states rather than from a floor that changed.

They say so in the fourth paragraph. They had it.

They also say that they could not prove it, that they had lost four people arriving at it, and that they were not going back in to finish the proof and they would not advise anybody else to either.

Nobody took it up for six years.

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Then the party that did it first went in with six, found a pillar, and activated it for a reason that had nothing to do with any of this. One of them says in his account that they thought it was a door.

Nothing happened. They went on. Two hours later the other three found the corresponding one, activated it, and the silver came up in both cities at once, and six people who thought half of them were dead started talking to each other.

The rest of it took them a day and a half and cost them two.

They published the mechanism inside a week, in full, for nothing, and the guide I am reading is built on that post.

Four parties reproduced it in the first month.

---

The last section is the one that stopped me being comfortable.

> **Knowing how it works is not a route.**

The districts are where they are. The canal is where it is. The Spire does not move.

Everything smaller than that changes. Which bridges are down. Which mechanisms are still live. Where the Wardens are thick and where they are not. The guide has a list of six things that were reliable in the first published clear and are not reliable now.

It tells you the rules of the place. It cannot tell you the way through it.

That is the opposite of Floor One, where I walked in with sixty-three years of other people’s corpses arranged into a route, and it was still not enough and I still had to go in twice.

---

I sat back at about four in the afternoon with my ribs aching from sitting and worked out what this floor actually is.

Floor One was a test of whether one person can survive.

It rewarded exactly that. Twenty out of a hundred, every man for himself, and I came first by being better on my own than ninety-nine other people were.

Floor Two is built specifically to prevent that.

---

I went down my own list and did it honestly.

Aten does nothing for a man six kilometres away in a city I cannot see into.

Talaria crosses ground. It does not cross states. Nothing I have crosses states.

Androphagos gives me six metres of living things and there will be three people who are not inside any six metres I will ever occupy.

Antaeus needs my feet on the floor I am standing on. Snare needs a contact point I can see.

KAIROS makes me ten times what I am, for one minute, in one city.

And Ouroboros brings me back and nobody else.

Every single thing I own is about me being enough. There is no line in there that reaches sideways.

---

So for the first time since I woke up in that bed, the people I go in with are not a convenience and not a complication.

Three of them are going to be somewhere I cannot reach, cannot see, cannot help and cannot bring back, and whether I clear this floor depends entirely on what those three do while I am not there.

That is not a thing I can be talented at. It is a thing I have to choose correctly, in advance, once.

I have been in exactly one situation in my life where I chose who to stand with, and four of those five are dead.

---

The recruitment section for Floor Two is not like the rest of the board.

Ordinary Gate recruitment is three lines and a meeting place. This is not that.

The posts have structure and the structure is the same across all of them, because somebody worked it out years ago and everybody copied it.

Level. Combat role, in a word. Mobility, and whether it is an Ability or footwork. What you have that stops something. Floor One result, with the placement. Floor Two attempts, and outcome, and what went wrong.

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The bottom of most posts is where the character is.

> **Not interested in high-rank Abilities attached to people who cannot hold a route. I would rather have a disciplined C than a B who improvises.**

> **If you have withdrawn from Floor Two before, say so in your first message. It is not a mark against you and I will find out anyway.**

> **You will be on the side you are put on. If you cannot function with people you have known for two days and cannot see, do not answer this.**

One post, from a man with three Floor Two attempts and no clears, is two paragraphs of requirements and then a third paragraph that is only about who talks when the pillar comes up, and how, and in what order.

Reading that section told me more about this part of the trade than the guide did.

Down here, strength gets your message opened. Nothing else about you gets you into the party.

---

I went through about thirty of them.

Most were wrong for me immediately. Two were people looking for somebody to carry them and had not quite said so. One was extremely good and had been full for four days and the author had not taken it down.

Then a verified mark, and a name I have stood eight metres from.

**Krüger.**

---

I opened it.

Level. Role in one word, which is *front*. Mobility: none, footwork only, stated plainly rather than dressed up. Defence: one Ability, directional, with the limitation written into the post where most people would have left it out.

Floor One: second of a hundred, two days ago.

Floor Two: no attempts.

Then the requirements, which are four lines, and the last line is about the pillar order.

---

I am not doing this because we are friends. We are not friends and neither of us has pretended otherwise.

I am doing it because I have spent nine hours watching what that man does when he is out of options.

He came off the aqueduct already losing and knew it forty minutes before I did. He never once let two people stand behind him. He conserved when I was spending.

And at the end of all of it, with one arm open to the elbow and a cracked defence, he stopped putting it up early and started reading my hips instead.

That is what I need three people to be doing in a city I cannot see into.

---

Three positions still open on the post.

I did not apply to it. There is a field for that and I did not use it.

I sent him a private request to talk about the attempt, four lines, no title in front of my name.

The status under the message changed before I had taken my hand off the desk.

> **Krüger is online.**