Chapter 300 - 291 — Learn the Formation I

Chapter 300: Chapter 291 — Learn the Formation I

The north hall still smelled of new timber.

Forty metres of sprung floor with the lines freshly painted on it, wall padding up to shoulder height, and a ceiling high enough that a person with a four-metre wingspan could open them fully and not scrape anything. Nobody had said that out loud when the plans were drawn. James suspected Maeve had specified it anyway.

Everybody had slept. Nobody was hurt. The Waiting Room had put them all back together after Floor 29 and there was no ache in any of them that was not just a Tuesday.

That was almost the worst part. There was nothing to fix except the thing they had come to fix.

Finn stood in the middle of the floor with an axe in each hand and no armour on.

"Right. One rule before anyone starts. We are not trying to beat her."

Cillian raised a hand. "Sorry, just — obviously?"

"I’m saying it because in about four minutes somebody’s going to start actually trying, and it’ll be you." Finn pointed the axe at him. "It’s pointless. She could put all five of us through that wall. That’s not what this is."

"So what is it," said Ronan.

Finn walked to the centre line.

"Baldwin. Floor 28. Floor 29. Three for three, the only thing that touched the red was James getting inside arm’s reach with the scythe. So the drill is this: can the four of us hold something faster and stronger than us still enough, and long enough, that James could get one clean swing in."

"And when he gets there?"

"He stops. He doesn’t swing." Finn glanced at James. "You’re not releasing that thing at her."

"Wasn’t going to," said James. The scythe was on his back, dark and dead. He had no intention of finding out what a released Authority weapon did to his own Reanimated.

Alice walked out to the far end of the hall, turned around, and folded her arms.

"Whenever you are ready."

---

**Rep one.**

Ronan went front, because that was where an enemy went. Finn took the left. Cillian held the right lane with his hand up and no output in it. Maeve set herself eight metres behind them, reading.

James waited at the back for the opening.

Ronan moved to cut Alice’s line forward.

Alice opened her wings and went over him.

She did not jump. There was one beat of both wings and she was six metres up and travelling, and Ronan’s entire body was committed to blocking a route she had simply declined to use.

Finn turned late — he had been covering the ground lane Ronan was meant to be forcing her into, and there was no longer any such thing as a ground lane.

Cillian had a shot for about half a second and did not take it, because Maeve was directly behind her.

James started forward toward the space Alice had left and had to stop dead, because Alice was not in that space, or anywhere near it.

She came down behind the entire formation and put her hand flat on Maeve’s shoulder.

"Rep," said Maeve.

The whole thing had taken four seconds.

---

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"Right," Finn said. "So that’s the problem."

"That’s the problem."

"Twenty-nine floors." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Twenty-nine floors of knowing where every one of you is going to be without looking. Ronan turns something, I’m already in the lane before it finishes turning, because I’ve watched him do it four hundred times." He looked down the hall. "She’s never done it once."

"Nobody told me where you expected me to go," said Alice.

"Everyone else knows where—" Cillian started.

"I am not everyone else."

Cillian opened his mouth, thought about it, and closed it again.

"Fair," he said.

---

Maeve took it over, because this was hers.

"We’re not building you a new language," she told Alice. "We already talk during fights and it works. There’s four things you specifically don’t know."

She held up a finger for each.

"One. When I call a direction, I’m either telling you to squeeze that side or telling you to leave it open. If I say a side and you don’t hear a verb, it means *pressure it*. If I say ’clear’ with it, get out of it and stay out.

"Two. When Cillian commits something serious, that lane belongs to him. Nothing crosses it. Not you, not James, not a skeleton.

"Three. When Ronan and Finn are steering something — and they will be, that’s most of what they do — they’re moving it somewhere on purpose. If you hit it from the far side, you undo it.

"Four. All of that stops mattering the second one of us is actually in trouble. Then do whatever you want."

Alice listened to all of it without any expression.

"So I am to stand and watch a target I could remove."

"Sometimes. Yes."

"Why."

"Because—"

"Because if you can kill it, kill it," Finn said, cutting across. "I mean that. If we get up there and you can put it in the ground in six seconds, do it, nobody in this room will complain. But if you *can’t* — if you go in and it survives you — then the four of us are standing in a shape we built for a plan that doesn’t exist anymore, and we find that out with the thing already on top of us."

He shrugged.

"I’d rather we had the second plan before we needed it. That’s all this is."

He tossed both axes onto the padding by the wall to prove the point, and walked back to his mark empty-handed.

Alice thought about that.

"That argument I accept," she said.

---

**Rep two.**

She went for the air again, because of course she did.

But Maeve was not watching her feet this time.

`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — FIELD READING]`

"She’s going up — *shoulders*, she’s going up left—"

She called it while Alice’s wings were still opening.

Ronan did not try to catch a flying woman, which would have been idiotic. He moved instead to the patch of floor she would need if she came down on Maeve’s side, and stood in it.

Alice, mid-air, adjusted her landing angle.

Which sent her toward Finn.

`[FINN HALE — BERSERKER DRIVE]`

He crossed nine metres in a blink and arrived in the lane before she got there, so that she either had to come down into him or turn again.

She turned again.

And Cillian had the angle.

He did not try to hurt her. He put a controlled line of white across the floor she was heading for, waist height, bright and continuous and extremely unpleasant to fly through, and held it.

Alice slipped out of it upward and sideways and was gone from that half of the hall entirely.

But James, jogging in from the back, understood what he was looking at.

She had been moved three times. Not chased. *Moved.* Every one of those adjustments had been made by somebody deciding something.

He came in on the opening.

Alice saw him at ten metres and broke off before he got to five.

"Rep," said Maeve.

Failed. Comfortably better.

---

"You were obvious," Alice said, wiping her hands.

"I know."

"You changed your entire posture the moment you decided to come. I could have read it from the other end of the building."

"Yeah."

"That is worse than being slow."

"That’s the small one," said Maeve.

They both looked at her.

"James, you waited." She came down the hall. "You waited until the opening was finished. You stood at the back and watched us build it and then you set off."

"That’s the drill—"

"That’s not how it works and you know it isn’t." She stopped in front of him. "Baldwin. How long did those windows last? When I branded him and Ronan turned him and Finn opened the shoulder — how long did that hole exist?"

James thought about a field in the mud.

"Less than a second."

"Less than a second. So you can’t be starting when it opens. You have to already be arriving." She tapped his chest with the back of her hand. "Move while we’re still building it. Trust that it’ll be there when you get there."

"And if it isn’t?"

"Then you’ve wasted a run and we go again," said Maeve. "You’ve done that a hundred times."

---

**Rep three.**

Alice did not fly.

She came straight down the middle of the hall at a walk that became a run, and she went for Maeve.

Not the front. Not the flanks. The person calling everything — the same read any intelligent thing makes about a battlefield, and the same read a prince of Caerleon had made three weeks ago.

`[RONAN CLEARY — PIERCING STEP]`

Ronan did not stop her. Nothing he owned was going to stop her.

He got into her line and forced her to go around the shield instead of through it, and that was the whole of his contribution and it was worth more than anything else on the floor.

She came round the outside.

Finn was already there.

`[FINN HALE — BERSERKER DRIVE]`

He arrived in the space she needed and she had to shift again — the third adjustment in about two seconds — and Maeve saw where the adjustments were pointing before Alice got there.

"*James. Left of Ronan, now, go—*"

James was moving before the sentence ended.

Not toward where Alice was. Toward where the four of them were about to put her.

Cillian had a clean shot and did not take it, because James’s path went through it.

Alice saw him coming late — genuinely late, half a second later than she should have — and did the only thing left, which was to go vertical.

"UP," Maeve shouted. "*Cillian, up—*"

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]`

He put it across the escape line at head height, a full one, controlled but real, and the air above her cracked white.

Alice had a choice between flying into it and coming back down.

She came down.

James was already inside four metres.

He got to the distance — the actual distance, the one where a released scythe would have gone through her ribs before she could reset — and he stopped with his hand still on the haft and did not draw it.

Nobody moved for a second.

"Rep," said Maeve, and there was something in her voice she had not managed to keep out.

---

"Do not celebrate that," said Alice.

"Nobody’s—"

"I had two opportunities to break Ronan’s arm and one to put Finn into that wall, and I did not take any of them, because I was going where you told me I was going." She was not being unkind about it. She was doing an inventory. "I chose the target and kept the target. A real enemy will change its mind."

Finn nodded slowly.

"Yeah. It will."

"Then that repetition proves less than you think."

"It proves the shape works when the thing cooperates," Finn said. "Which is one more thing than we knew twenty minutes ago." He picked his axes back up. "So do it again and don’t cooperate."