Chapter 286 - 277 — The Warden’s Blind Spot II

Chapter 286: Chapter 277 — The Warden’s Blind Spot II

James looked at the counter and did the sum out loud in eleven words.

"Get it fully onto the moving stone before that hits zero."

"I can throw it," said Alice.

"You can throw it and it walks back on. That’s the job — it doesn’t get back on the marked floor. Not for the last five seconds, not for one."

Alice’s chin came up very slightly.

"That I can do."

The Warden did not wait for the rest of the plan.

It came off the corridor line at Ronan with the maul already up, and Ronan took the swing on the angle again and gave a step, and then another, and this time the steps were where he wanted them — back, and to the left, toward the seam.

Finn stayed off it until it tried to turn away from Ronan, and then opened its flank every time it did.

James put himself directly opposite Finn so it could not cover both sides at once, and the Warden had to pick, and every time it picked it lost something.

Maeve held.

Cillian held.

Alice went round behind it, wide, walking, in no particular hurry.

And two metres from the seam the Warden worked out what was happening to it.

Everything changed.

It stopped swinging at Ronan. It set its heels, dropped its weight, and started fighting for the ground instead of for them — and it was much, much harder to move. It let Finn put an axe into its shoulder to the haft rather than turn, because turning meant giving up half a metre. It ignored James entirely for three full seconds to shove backward toward the marked line. It swung at Ronan not to hit him but to push him off the seam, and when Ronan held, it threw its own body at him.

"That’s it," Maeve said, and there was something almost happy in it. "That’s it, that’s it — it doesn’t care about us at all."

"Then brand it."

Maeve raised the staff and put the mark on the left hip joint — the one carrying all the weight now, the one that had to hold while the thing braced.

`[MAEVE DONNELLY — HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]`

A ring of pale violet settled into the seam and stayed there.

Alice reached the Warden’s back, set her feet, put both hands flat between its shoulder blades, and pushed.

The Warden planted everything it had into the left hip to resist her.

"Now," said Maeve.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]`

The bolt came down the passage and hit the brand dead centre, and the branded joint cracked all the way through with a noise like a dropped slab, and the Warden dropped six inches onto that side.

Finn was already running.

`[FINN HALE — GIANT BREAKER STRIKE]`

He did not go for the head and he did not go for the chest. He went for the broken hip, both axes into the same fracture at the same instant, and took the rest of the joint apart — and the Warden’s whole left side lost the ability to brace against anything.

Ronan hit the opposite side with shield and shoulder.

Alice pushed.

The three of them moved it a metre and a half in one second, and the front foot went over the seam, and the body went over the seam, and the Warden went down onto one knee on worn, unmarked, unlit stone.

Its remaining back foot came up and reached for the light.

James got there first.

He did not use Grave Step, because there was nothing behind the Warden to step to — the last corpse on this floor had gone into a skeleton an hour ago, and the skeleton was four hundred metres down a corridor and dead. So he went the long way, round Ronan’s outside, and Maeve threw a knee-high spur of stone across the Warden’s reaching heel to cost it half a second, and half a second was what James needed.

He came in on the ruined left side and drove Durendal two-handed down through the wreck of the hip.

The foot came off the light.

`[LABYRINTH RECONFIGURATION: 00:05]`

The Warden knew.

It abandoned all five of them, dropped the maul, and threw itself bodily back toward the marked corridor on one working leg and both arms.

Alice was standing in the way.

She did not attack it. She simply put herself between four metres of scrambling stone and the lit floor behind her, planted, caught it, and held.

`[00:04]`

Her heels dragged eight inches.

`[00:03]`

They stopped dragging.

`[00:02]`

Finn was hauling at its shoulder. Ronan had the shield jammed under its remaining arm. Cillian was shouting something nobody heard.

`[00:01]`

The city moved.

The grinding came up through the flagstones and the whole unmarked section under the Warden and under Alice and under all of them slid sideways with a sound like a mountain clearing its throat.

The fixed corridor did not move at all.

James, staggering, watched the two things separate — the marked floor holding its position, the plain floor carrying the Warden away from it, and the thin orange line running out of the creature’s heel stretching across the widening gap, thinner, and thinner, and thinner.

It snapped.

The light went out of the grooves in the Warden’s body from the feet upward, like water draining.

`[WARDEN ANCHOR DISRUPTED]`

`[REGENERATION DISABLED]`

"IT’S OFF," Cillian screamed. "IT’S OFF, IT’S OFF, THE CRACKS AREN’T CLOSING—"

They were not.

Every wound they had put in it over the last four minutes was still open. The hip had not knitted. The shoulder Finn had buried an axe in was still an axe-width across.

"Finish it," said James.

---

It was over in twenty seconds.

Alice stayed between it and the corridor and would not be moved off that line for anything. Ronan shut the only other retreat with his body. Maeve kept the brand burning on the shattered hip so nobody had to guess where to hit.

Cillian had one strike left in him that was worth anything and he said so, and used it when James called it and not before.

Finn worked the broken side and only the broken side.

And James went up the middle.

Durendal went into the split of the chest plate, all the way, and the Warden’s last swing came for the corridor rather than for him — one desperate lunge past everybody, toward the lit stone, with nothing behind it.

Ronan caught the arm on the shield.

Alice stopped the body.

Finn put both axes into the opening and widened it.

James let go of the sword, put his palm flat against the exposed core of the thing, and emptied it at contact range.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,760 / 3,100]`

The Warden came apart for the second time.

The pieces hit the ground.

And stayed there.

`[THE WARDEN DEFEATED]`

`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE COMPLETE]`

`[FLOOR 26 CLEARED]`

---

**[ZeroFan]:** WAIT

**[GalwayGoblin]:** THEY MOVED HIM OFF THE ROAD

**[CorkClimber]:** THEY MOVED HIM OFF THE ROAD????

**[user88317]:** SHE COULD KILL IT THE WHOLE TIME. IT JUST DIDNT STAY DEAD

**[FinnsLeftAxe]:** finn hit the SAME LEG four times. FOUR

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** MAEVE FOUND IT. MAEVE FOUND ALL OF IT

**[FrontierWife]:** i did not understand one second of that and i loved it

**[AshesAndBones]:** the wall moved and the light snapped and i actually shouted in my kitchen

---

The corridors stopped.

That was the strangest part. The city had been breathing since they arrived — that low grind every fifteen minutes, that four-second hum in the back teeth — and now there was nothing. No counter in the corner of James’s eye. No pressure in the stone.

Every passage was where it was, and was going to stay there.

Cillian sat down on a broken chunk of Warden and put his head between his knees for a moment.

Then he looked up at Alice.

"So we finally found one you couldn’t sort by hitting it harder."

Alice turned her head and looked at him.

Cillian raised both palms.

"Grand. Good. Great floor, everyone."

James was watching Alice, though, and had been for about ten seconds.

She was not looking at the Warden with any satisfaction. She had barely looked at it at all. Her eyes went from the dead thing to the seam in the floor where the marked stone met the plain stone, then to Maeve, who was crouched at the line with her hand flat on it, still reading it, even now.

Alice looked at Maeve for a while.

Then she looked at James, and gave him a small nod, roughly a centimetre of it, and said nothing whatsoever.

James did not say anything about teamwork.

`[FLOOR 26 CLEAR REWARDS DISTRIBUTING]`

`[JAMES GANNER — EXP GAINED: 7,400]`

`[EXP: 60,715 / 66,000]`

`[LEVEL: 41]`

`[FLOOR MVP — MAEVE DONNELLY]`

`[REASON: IDENTIFICATION OF FIXED-STRUCTURE ANCHOR]`

`[REANIMATED SLOTS: 1 / 5 OCCUPIED]`

`[ANATHEMA — ALICE]`

"MVP," said Finn. "Maeve. Obviously."

"I found a floor," said Maeve, standing up and brushing grit off her knees. "I didn’t hit anything once."

"You found the *whole* floor."

`[FLOOR 27 AVAILABLE]`

James looked down the corridor that had never moved, all the way into the dark where his skeleton had died, motionless now and going to stay motionless, and then he closed the prompt without opening it.

"Home," he said. "It’ll keep."