Chapter 253 — The Field Where Kingdoms Die I

Chapter 253: Chapter 253 — The Field Where Kingdoms Die I

James reached for the console and did not get to it, because Maeve got there first.

"No," she said. "If the entire country is about to watch the five of us walk into the last floor of this thing, I’m doing the introduction."

James took his hand back.

"All yours."

He had seen her work before, on the wall at the western settlement and across a negotiating table in a glass building on the docks, and he had never once seen her do this.

She checked the framing on the lens, moved half a step to her left so the chamber lights were behind her shoulder rather than over her head, and put a loose strand of hair back behind her ear without hurrying about it. Her posture changed by about two inches and stopped looking like a soldier’s.

Then she looked into the camera and smiled slightly, because she already knew exactly what was about to happen.

[LIVE BROADCAST STARTED]

[REGION: IRELAND]

[VIEWERS: 0 → 184,000 → 617,000 → 1,300,000+]

**[MaeveCallMe]:** OH SHE’S HOSTING

**[DublinWolf]:** FINALLY SOMEONE WITH PRESENTATION SKILLS

**[CallahanCult]:** respectfully this camera angle is dangerous

**[CorkClimber]:** disrespectfully marry me

**[FinnsLeftAxe]:** finn move ur blocking maeve

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** THEY HAVEN’T EVEN ENTERED YET

**[GalwayGoblin]:** floor 25 TODAY???

**[ZeroFan]:** FINAL BROKEN CROWN FLOOR LETS GOOOO

Maeve read about four lines of it, which was all she needed.

She raised one eyebrow at the lens.

"Behave."

The feed got very considerably worse, and she let it, and moved on.

"Good morning. Team Zero is attempting Floor 25 today. It’s the final floor of the Broken Crown, and before anyone asks me what’s waiting in there — this is the entire briefing we were given."

She turned the panel toward the camera.

[FLOOR 25 AVAILABLE]

[THE BROKEN CROWN — FINAL FLOOR]

[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: KILL PRINCE BALDWIN]

"Three lines. That’s it. No enemy information, no map, no idea where he’ll be standing or what’s standing in front of him. We know the name of the man we’re being sent to kill and nothing else, and I’d rather you heard that from me now than assumed we were holding something back."

The chat went somewhere else entirely.

**[CrownLawIE]:** korea picked baldwin though 💀

**[RaymondWasRight]:** and america picked raymond. different instance

**[LimerickMage]:** WAIT IF JAMES KILLS BALDWIN WHAT HAPPENS TO PEOPLE WHO CHOSE HIM???

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** surely every party has its own campaign state

**[user88317]:** "surely" based on WHAT 😂

**[CorkClimber]:** imagine korea goes back in and james deleted their prince

**[GalwayGoblin]:** BALDWIN HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM THE SERVER

**[TowerLawyer]:** could one party’s ending alter the other branch though???

The same question came past four times in fifteen seconds, so Maeve answered it.

"On the foreign campaigns — yes, we’ve read the same reports you have. Other parties chose differently and they’re clearly living in different versions of this kingdom. What none of us know is whether those versions can reach each other." She shrugged, one shoulder. "If we kill Baldwin today, I have no idea what that does or doesn’t mean for a Korean party who’s fighting for him. Neither does anyone in this room."

"And anyone telling you otherwise is guessing," Finn said from behind her.

Maeve turned the camera about fifteen degrees.

"He’d like it on the record that he volunteered that."

**[FinnsLeftAxe]:** HE SPOKE

**[CorkClimber]:** ask him if baldwin was still the right choice 😂

**[RaymondWasRight]:** FINN APOLOGY STREAM WHEN

Finn read exactly enough of it to know what they were asking, and went back to his axes without dignifying any of it.

She gave Ireland the rest of them without making a production of it, just letting the lens travel.

Ronan checking the straps on the replacement shield one last time, the face of it clean and undented in a way none of them were used to seeing. Cillian waking the conductors along both forearms, which produced an immediate wall of blue-white in the chat. Finn rolling both grips. James at the entry panel with Durendal at his hip.

Then Maeve brought the camera back to herself.

"Right. That’s the last you’ll get out of me as a presenter. From the second we go through, I’m support, and I’ll be busy." A beat. "Try to stay calm."

She handed it back to James, and the room changed.

He looked once around the four of them.

Then he selected the floor.

[FLOOR 25 ENTRY CONFIRMED]

---

The noise arrived before the light let go of him.

James heard it while he was still coming out of transport, and it was not the noise of a battle, it was the noise of *thousands* — voices layered on voices, war horns going in three directions, something enormous roaring somewhere to the east, hooves, steel on steel and steel on shields, and under all of it a low continuous sound that turned out to be men screaming far enough away that they had blurred into weather.

Then his vision cleared and Caerleon’s field opened in front of him.

They were standing behind the forward companies of Raymond’s Northern Legion, on the northern side, on ground that had already been fought over once — the grass was gone and what they were standing on was churned mud with things in it.

South of them, the whole lower half of the field was Crown. Baldwin’s army stretched from the western tree line to the eastern rise, and behind it, far off through the haze, the pale walls of Caerleon and the palace above them.

Along the eastern side of that army stood a long block of grey.

James found it inside four seconds, because he had known where to look since the projection over the ruined junction. Six thousand men in Vane’s colours, standing exactly where their marshal had spent his life putting them.

And behind Raymond, north and northeast, the hills were moving.

The host that had come through the eastern pass had finally arrived at the war. It was coming down onto the field in loose masses rather than formations — orcs in the hundreds, goblins running ahead of them, ogres visible above the rest, and things further back that James could not identify at this distance.

It was not sitting politely behind Raymond waiting its turn.

Off to the east, a Crown formation had turned completely around and was fighting goblins in its own rear while the formation beside it stayed faced north at Raymond, and neither of them could help the other.

Two hundred meters south of that, an ogre was standing in the middle of Baldwin’s own line swinging a tree trunk, and Crown men in Crown colours were dying under it while Crown archers behind them kept shooting north over its head at the Northern Legion.

And in the dead ground between the two armies, where the first exchange had already left bodies, goblins were moving through the fallen and putting knives into wounded men without once checking which crest was on them.

Three wars, sharing a field.

[FLOOR 25 — THE BROKEN CROWN]

[FINAL FLOOR]

[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: KILL PRINCE BALDWIN]