Chapter 302 - 293 — The World That Burned I

Chapter 302: Chapter 293 — The World That Burned I

Nobody said goodbye twice.

It had all been said at the table the night before, and his mother put a mug in front of him at ten past eight and did not ask him anything, and Nyra sat across from him with her wings out and her chin on her fist and watched him check his kit for the second time.

Durendal. The coat. The belt with the split in it.

The scythe, dark and sealed, across his back.

"Right," said James.

"Message," said Nyra.

"The second we’re out."

Alice put everything away in the hall — wings, halo, tail — because they were going out the front and there would be cameras at the end of the road, and there was no sense being photographed in a garden in Ballymun with a four-metre wingspan.

`[TEAM ZERO — PARTY FORMATION]`

`[JAMES GANNER — CONFIRMED]`

`[FINN HALE — CONFIRMED]`

`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — CONFIRMED]`

`[RONAN CLEARY — CONFIRMED]`

`[CILLIAN WARD — CONFIRMED]`

`[CHALLENGER PARTY: 5 / 5]`

`[REANIMATED — ACTIVE]`

`[ANATHEMA — BOUND — MANIFEST]`

James confirmed Floor 30.

Nobody made a speech. There was nothing left to prepare.

The floor took them.

---

The first thing was the smell.

Not smoke. Older than smoke — the flat mineral smell of a place that had burned so long ago the burning had finished being an event and become a material.

They were standing on a road.

It ran wide and straight through what had been a city, and the city had come down inward on both sides of it — walls fallen into their own footprints, roof beams collapsed and gone to charcoal, whole terraces of stone slumped like something that had softened before it cooled. Ash lay over everything in a grey blanket that had been rained on and dried a hundred times.

In places the road itself had gone to dark glass. James put his boot on a patch of it and it did not crunch.

There were weapons in the ash. Swords, spearheads, the edge of a shield sticking up out of a drift like a stone in a field. Nothing was scattered the way things scatter in a fresh fight. They had been lying there long enough to be part of the ground.

Nothing was burning. Nothing had burned in a very long time.

`[FLOOR 30]`

`[FLOOR 30 — STORY FLOOR]`

`[MAIN STORYLINE ACTIVATED]`

`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: REACH THE LAST STRONGHOLD]`

`[LIVE BROADCAST STARTED — REGION: IRELAND]`

"Story floor," said Cillian, and did not follow it with a joke.

The last one had been Caerleon.

---

Everybody else started reading the ground the way they always did — Ronan looking for exits, Maeve for sightlines, Finn for where a thing would come from.

Alice was looking at the city.

She had let everything back out the moment they arrived, wings loose, halo dark behind her head, and she was standing in the middle of the road turning slowly, taking in the collapsed terraces and the glassed stone and the ash, and she was not looking for anything at all.

James had known her for four months. He had seen her bored, irritated, amused, and murderous, and had never once seen her look like this.

"Do you know it?"

Alice did not answer immediately.

She looked down the length of the road, past the fallen fronts of the buildings, at the shape of the horizon behind them.

"No," she said.

"You’re sure?"

"I do not recognise this city. I do not know who lived in it. I could not tell you the name of one street." She turned her head. "What I have is a world burning and the name Wrath, and I have had that for as long as I have had anything. I cannot tell you whether this is that world or another one. I could not tell you how many there were."

"How many *worlds*?"

"That is the part I do not know either," said Alice, and started walking.

---

The stronghold was visible from where they stood.

Two kilometres up the road, maybe three, past everything: a wall and a keep behind it, dark against the flat sky, the only structure in the whole dead city that had not gone down. The fire had reached it — the outer face was black to the parapet — and it had held.

It was the only thing on the horizon that was still a building.

"Well," said Ronan. "At least we don’t have to look for it."

"That’ll be the problem," Maeve said.

She turned round before they set off.

"Same as the hall. Ronan front, Finn off his shoulder. Cillian, long lines — you’ll get more warning here than you got on twenty-six, use it. James in the middle so you can work either side of the road."

"And me," said Alice.

"You’ve got the right flank. Those buildings." Maeve pointed at the collapsed terraces on the eastern side, where four separate alleys let out onto the road. "Pressure, no crossing. If something comes out of one of those and it’s mine, I’ll say."

Alice looked at the alleys for a second, and then went and walked on the right.

She did not fly ahead. Four days ago she would have.

---

James saw the red before they saw a single enemy.

It was in the road.

He nearly walked over it. A crack in the glassed stone about a metre long, and down inside it, well below the surface, a thin thread of dull red light — no brighter than a coal about to go out.

He stopped.

Twenty metres on there was another one. Then two more in a section of collapsed paving, and a long seam of it running under the base of a wall, and once he had seen the first he could not stop seeing them.

It was not coming toward them. It was not moving at all.

It was just there, underneath, the way water is underneath.

Maeve came up on his shoulder and followed his eyes down into the crack and said nothing whatsoever.

Finn saw it a hundred metres later and stopped walking for two full steps.

"Right," he said, and started again.

Nobody said anything else about it.

---

The first ones were at a collapsed barricade where the road narrowed.

Six of them, standing in and around the old defensive works — a timber and stone wall thrown up across the street a very long time ago and knocked down at least twice.

`[RUINED SOLDIER]`

`[LEVEL: 46]`

`[HP: 6,200 / 6,200]`

Five of those. Mail and plate over a shape that was more or less a man, faces closed, moving with their shields already up.

And behind them, heavier:

`[RUINED GUARD]`

`[LEVEL: 48]`

`[HP: 10,000 / 10,000]`

All six of them had red light running through them.

Not around a wound. There were no wounds. It ran in the seams of the armour and across the strips of skin at the wrist and throat, faint and steady, the way it ran in the cracks of the road — because it *was* the same light as the cracks in the road, at the same brightness, and James had known that before he consciously thought it.

They were not being empowered.

They came like that.

"Front," said Ronan.

---

Two came at him together and did it properly.

The first went high at his shoulder to make him lift the shield. The second waited for the shield to come up and put a thrust in around the bottom edge, which is exactly what James would have done and exactly what a mindless thing does not do.

Ronan did not take both. He turned the high one across the face of the shield and let his whole body go with it, which moved him out of the second one’s line and shoved their pairing a foot sideways.

Finn came into the foot.

His axe hit the outside soldier across the shoulder plate hard enough to dish the metal.

`[RUINED SOLDIER — HP: 6,200 → 4,650]`

It did not stagger.

That was the thing. It took a blow that should have folded it round the wound and it simply turned, brought the sword across, and attacked Finn — and Finn had to take the strike on an axe head and give ground, and he knew what he was looking at before he had finished the step.

"Same shit," he said.

"Yeah," said James.

Nobody needed the rest of the sentence.

But the wounded one did not throw itself at Finn either. It pressed twice, took a bad angle, and pulled back behind its partner’s shield to let the second man take over.

*It’s covering.*

Baldwin had done that. Baldwin had done all of it — kept his head, held his line, fought like a soldier the entire time he was wrapped in that light.

The spear fighter behind them changed its angle to cover the gap.

And the Guard did not move at all. It stood behind the barricade with the weapon down and waited for somebody to over-commit.

---

One of them came round the left to get at Maeve, and James met it before it got past him.

Durendal took its sword. It gave ground into the broken wall on that side of the road and kept its shoulder to the stone, which meant James could not get outside its guard, because there was no outside — the wall was doing half its work for it.

So he went the other way.

He forced the sword up with the crossguard, put his shoulder inside the arc where a shield is useless, and cast at contact range.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 3,040 / 3,100]`

`[RUINED SOLDIER — HP: 6,200 → 2,740]`

The breastplate opened from collar to hip.

James saw what happened next from about eighteen inches away.

The red already in its armour did not stay the same. It gathered — pulled in from the shoulders and the belt and the backs of the hands, all of it running toward the wound, and it brightened there until the inside of the wound was lit.

The body stopped sagging. The knees came back under it.

James did not wait to see how well that worked.

He put Durendal through the hole while the light was still arriving.

`[RUINED SOLDIER — HP: 2,740 → 0]`

`[RUINED SOLDIER SLAIN]`

`[EXP GAINED: 300]`

`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 26,445 / 69,000]`

`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

`[MANA: 3,070 / 3,100]`

The corpse went down and the red came out of it.

James was watching for it. He was expecting the Floor 29 behaviour — the threads pouring off the shoulders, gathering, and going somewhere.

It did not go anywhere.

It ran out of the body the way water runs out of a dropped bucket, straight down, into the ash and the stone underneath, and it was gone in about a second and a half.

And under the body, faintly, through the cracks in the road, there was already more of it.

James stood over the corpse with his sword hanging.

On Floor 29 it had crossed a hundred and twenty metres to reach a door.

It did not have to cross anything here.

It was already everywhere he was standing.