Chapter 285 - 276 — The Warden’s Blind Spot I

Chapter 285: Chapter 276 — The Warden’s Blind Spot I

They were in place before the third footstep landed.

Ronan crossed the mouth of the corridor and set his feet at an angle, shield high and turned, not square. Finn drifted out to his right, four feet, axes level. Cillian backed off down the passage until he had a clean lane past both of them. Maeve put her shoulder to the corner block and watched the corridor edges instead of the corridor.

James took two long steps back from Ronan’s heel to give himself casting room.

Alice stayed at his shoulder with her wings half out and did not move forward at all.

The fourth footstep came, and then it was close enough to see.

`[THE WARDEN]`

`[FLOOR BOSS]`

That was all the System had.

It came up out of the dark at a walk — four metres of pale grey stone in the rough shape of a man, shoulders like the lintel of a door, hands the size of Ronan’s shield. The plates of it were fitted, not carved, and the seams between them ran with the same shallow grooved markings that Maeve had found cut into the base of the corridor’s doorways.

The markings were lit. A thin sullen orange, running down through the joints of its arms and legs and back out of its heels into the floor.

The floor was lit too, the same lines, in the same places.

It carried a maul on one shoulder. Head of it was a single block with the corners knocked off, and it had been swung enough times to polish the face of it smooth.

Finn saw the grooves and did the arithmetic out loud in three words.

"It’s the corridor."

The Warden brought the maul off its shoulder and came.

---

Ronan did not plant.

He took the first swing on the angle, shield turned thirty degrees off the line, and let the head of the maul skid across the face of it and go into the wall — and even then it drove him back half a metre and put a crack through the flagstone under his rear boot.

He came off it shaking his forearm out.

"Heavy," he said. "Heavy and slow to reset. Don’t stand square."

Finn was already inside.

He came in under the maul’s follow-through while it was still low, both axes into the back of the Warden’s right knee where the plates had to open to bend, and the second one went in far enough to stick.

Stone chips came off it. Orange light bled out of the seam.

The knee held.

"It’s not going down off that," Finn said, ripping the axe free and getting out.

"Then don’t spend it all," said Cillian.

He put one bolt in. Not the wide thing, not the overload — a single tight lance of white into the same right side, hip height, and the crack it made in the plate was the length of a hand.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

Maeve did not cast anything.

She stood at the corner with her staff planted and watched how the thing turned, which was on the ball of its left foot, always, and always ending with its heels back toward the corridor.

The Warden pivoted to face Finn and gave James four clear feet of ribs.

James took them.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,880 / 3,100]`

The grey light went into the seam under its arm and blew a plate off the shoulder, and James was moving after it with Durendal already coming round, the edge screaming off the stone.

The Warden stopped caring about Finn.

Its head came round to James, and the maul came round with it — and the swing did not stop at James. It carried on through the arc, past him, out toward the small still figure standing behind his left shoulder with her hands empty.

Alice moved.

One beat of the right wing and she was not there anymore. The maul went through the space she had been standing in and into the wall, and Alice came out of the movement already low, already inside its reach, and the red-gold blade was in her hand.

She put it through the elbow joint of the arm holding the maul.

It went in like the arm was a curtain.

Red-gold light came out the far side of the joint and the stone around it went from grey to nothing in a fist-sized circle, and the Warden’s whole right arm stopped answering.

"*There*," Finn shouted, and went.

He hit the open elbow from the outside while Alice was still in the seam.

Ronan came off the wall and put shield and shoulder into the Warden’s hip before it could turn, and it could not step back to reset because Ronan was where the step needed to go.

"Cillian—"

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

The bolt went straight into the hole Alice had opened. The seam blew wide and orange light came pouring out of it and the arm came off at the elbow and hit the flagstones with the maul still in the hand.

James came through the gap Finn had made and drove Durendal two-handed into the split of the chest plate.

The Warden came apart.

Not dramatically. It simply stopped being one thing and became several, and the several hit the ground and rolled, and the corridor went quiet except for stone settling.

`[BROADCAST — VIEWERS: 2,110,884 ▲]`

**[GalwayGoblin]:** WHAT

**[ZeroFan]:** THE ARM. THE ARM CAME OFF

**[FinnsLeftAxe]:** SHE PUT IT THROUGH THE ELBOW LIKE IT WASNT THERE

**[CorkClimber]:** floor boss lasted 40 SECONDS

**[user88317]:** FORTY SECONDS

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** ronan taking that first hit on the angle btw. class.

**[FrontierWife]:** i almost feel bad for it

**[AshesAndBones]:** almost

---

James waited for the panel.

That was the thing.

He had cleared twenty-five floors and every single one of them had ended with a boss on the ground and a wall of gold text across his vision half a second later, and he was already braced for it, already tasting it, and his eyes were up in the top right corner where it always came.

Nothing came.

No kill line. No EXP. No objective complete.

His mana sat where it was.

"James," said Maeve.

"I know."

"Nothing came up."

"I know."

Ronan lowered the shield an inch and looked at the pieces on the floor, and that was when the rest of them noticed the second thing.

The stone was not dissolving.

Everything they had ever killed in this tower had gone — gone to ash, gone to light, gone into the floor. The pieces of the Warden were lying there like masonry.

Then the piece nearest the corridor mouth moved.

It dragged itself across the flagstones. Not rolling — dragging, orange light crawling along its underside, hauling three feet of broken shoulder plate toward the marked corridor, and when it reached the edge of the lit stone it went *into* it, sank in like a stone dropped in water, and the surface closed over it.

The severed arm went next.

Then the chest.

Then all of it, one piece after another, from the far side of the passage inward, and the grooves in the corridor floor lit up brighter with every piece that went home.

"No," said Cillian. "No, no, no, hang on. Hang on. We killed him. We *killed* the bastard. I watched him come apart, I helped—"

Forty feet down the fixed corridor, the floor began pushing something back up out of itself.

It came up shoulders first.

Alice watched it happen with her head tilted and her mouth in a flat line, and she did not look impressed or frightened. She looked like a woman who had been handed the wrong change.

"Tedious," she said.

---

The second Warden came out whole and stepped off the corridor floor with the light still running out of its heels.

`[NEXT RECONFIGURATION: 00:07:11]`

"Right," said Finn. "Same again?"

"No," James said. "Same again gets us this again in a minute and a half. Nobody kills it. Everybody *look* at it."

So they fought it while watching it.

Ronan held the line and gave a foot of ground when he had to and took it back when he could. Finn kept the pressure on the right side because the right side was where the last one had opened, and got nowhere, because this one was fresh.

Maeve stopped watching its shoulders and started watching its feet.

And James did something he would not normally do, which was retreat.

He went backward down the passage they had come in by — the ordinary one, the unmarked one, the one whose flagstones had grooves worn into them from a thousand years of sliding — and he made himself worth following. He put a Necro Blast into its face on the way.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,820 / 3,100]`

It followed.

Six metres. Eight.

Then James crossed the seam.

He felt it under his boot before he saw it, the change from fitted stone to laid stone, and there was a line across the floor there as clean as a kerb — marked and lit on one side, plain and worn on the other.

James took three more steps and turned round with Durendal up.

The Warden stopped at the line.

It was close enough. That was the whole point and James made sure of it — he stood there in the open with his guard low and eight feet of clear air between them, well inside the reach of that maul, and the Warden had a shot and knew it had a shot.

It leaned. It put its weight forward. Its front foot came down past the line.

Its back foot did not leave the marked stone.

It swung from there instead, off balance and short, and the maul came down a foot and a half in front of James’s boots and broke a flagstone in half.

"James," Maeve called. "Do that again. Same place."

He did it again.

He took a step further out and let his sword drop and stood there like an idiot, and the Warden’s whole body strained toward him and the back foot stayed exactly where it was, heel on the light.

Finn saw it too and went round the far side, trying to shove it sideways off the marked corridor with a shoulder into its flank and both axes hammering at the hip to make it move.

The Warden gave ground.

But it gave ground *along* the corridor. Backward, down the marked line, never once stepping off it, and it wore two axe wounds to do it that it did not need to wear.

Maeve came off the corner block.

"It’s not chasing us and it’s not protecting itself," she said. "It’s protecting the floor it’s standing on. That’s the connection. That’s where the pieces went."

"So it can’t leave the road," said Ronan.

"It can. It just won’t." Maeve pointed at the front foot, still over the line. "It’ll reach across all day. It won’t stand across."

Cillian said, "So we make it."

`[NEXT RECONFIGURATION: 00:03:44]`