Chapter 303 - 294 — The World That Burned II

Chapter 303: Chapter 294 — The World That Burned II

He put his hand on the dead man’s chest and took the corpse anyway.

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,990 / 3,100]`

It came up in six seconds, ordinary, obedient, exactly as usable as any other body he had ever raised.

That was worth knowing. Whatever the red was doing to these things, it did not touch the part of them that answered to him.

He sent it wide round the barricade instead of keeping it at his elbow.

One of the soldiers turned to intercept it, which cost them the left end of the shield line, and Ronan drove forward into the space with Finn on his shoulder.

Maeve did not brand the fresh one.

She put it on the shoulder Finn had already dished, because a brand on undamaged plate is a brand on plate.

`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]`

Finn hit the same place for the third time.

`[RUINED SOLDIER — HP: 4,650 → 1,880]`

It stayed up.

It stayed up with the shoulder joint visibly wrong and the arm not tracking properly, and it kept its shield where it should be, and it backed toward the Guard to be covered.

Cillian had been waiting on that.

He took the leg as it retreated — a short controlled bolt, not the big one, into the knee it was putting weight on.

`[RUINED SOLDIER — HP: 1,880 → 760]`

Finn killed it with two ordinary strikes and no skill at all.

`[RUINED SOLDIER SLAIN — PARTY KILL]`

---

The Guard came in once Ronan and Finn were extended, which was the moment it had been waiting for since they arrived.

It brought the weapon down on Ronan’s shield and Ronan angled it correctly and was still driven back a full step, boots ploughing ash.

And the follow-up came across the road on the right-hand side.

Alice was already moving.

Not to Ronan. Ronan was fine and she had been told what fine looked like. The swing was coming through the alley mouth she had been given, and Maeve had not said a word, and Alice did not wait for her to.

She took the weapon line aside on one forearm.

Then she stepped inside its reach and put the red-gold blade through the middle of it.

`[RUINED GUARD — HP: 10,000 → 1,900]`

Eight thousand one hundred in one movement.

The Guard should not have been standing. The blade had gone in under the sternum and out through the back plate and there was daylight through the middle of a Floor 30 heavy defender.

The red went brighter than James had seen it since Caerleon.

All of it — every thread in the armour, in the gauntlets, along the throat — pulled toward the hole and lit, and the Guard put one foot forward.

`[RUINED GUARD — HP: 1,900 / 10,000]`

The wound did not close. Nothing about it closed.

It just kept walking.

Alice’s whole posture changed. Whatever she had been doing before this, she stopped doing it.

She took its head off.

`[RUINED GUARD — HP: 1,900 → 0]`

`[RUINED GUARD SLAIN — ALICE]`

`[EXP GAINED: 500]`

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

`[MANA: 3,020 / 3,100]`

No panel came up for Alice. It never did.

The red poured out of the Guard and went straight down into the road, and did not travel one metre in any direction.

---

James’s hand had gone to the scythe without him deciding it.

"Don’t," said Maeve.

He looked at her.

"Thirty minutes." She was not even watching him; she was watching the last two soldiers. "That’s what you get. We’re two kilometres from the front gate and we haven’t seen the actual floor yet."

James took his hand off it.

"Yeah."

"You’ll want it later."

"I know."

---

They finished the last two without anything clever.

Ronan and Finn broke what was left of the line. Cillian took one at range once the shields stopped overlapping. The last one tried to get back behind the barricade and reset, and James’s skeleton was already standing where the gap was and put a dead man’s sword through it.

`[RUINED SOLDIER SLAIN — UNDEAD KILL]`

`[EXP GAINED: 300]`

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

`[MANA: 3,050 / 3,100]`

James finished the other with Durendal.

`[RUINED SOLDIER SLAIN]`

`[EXP GAINED: 300]`

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

`[MANA: 3,080 / 3,100]`

`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 28,145 / 69,000]`

No clear panel came up.

Of course it did not. Six dead men at a barricade were not the floor. The floor was two kilometres up the road with its gate facing them.

---

Maeve went round everybody in about forty seconds.

Ronan’s arm was fine. Finn had taken one on an axe head and nothing on his body. Cillian had spent almost nothing and said so with visible pride. Nobody was hurt.

Alice had not been touched.

There were four more corpses on the barricade and James raised exactly one of them.

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA]`

`[MANA: 3,000 / 3,100]`

"Two’s enough," he said, before Cillian asked. "It’s two kilometres. I’m not carrying six of them up a road so they can look impressive."

He sent the new one three hundred metres ahead as a scout and kept the first one at the back of the group, and they walked.

---

The city told them things without ever explaining anything.

The barricades all faced the same way.

That was the first one, and once James noticed it he checked every position they passed. Every collapsed defensive work, every stone-and-timber wall, every dug-in line across a side street — all of them built to stop something coming *up* the road, toward the stronghold.

Nobody had been defending the city. They had been falling back through it.

There were piles of weapons at the third position that had gone into each other. Not scattered — piled, thirty or forty blades run together at the tips into one lump of metal, the way a bundle of candles goes.

Half a building on the eastern side had no soot on it at all. It was smooth. The stone had gone to glass on the face nearest the road and stayed rough on the far side, so that you could stand at the corner and put one hand on each.

There were no bodies anywhere.

Nothing was written down. No banner, no crest, no plaque, no scratched message on a wall. If anyone had left a record of what happened here, the record had gone with everything else.

James walked beside Alice for a stretch of it.

"Anything?"

"It is closer," she said.

"Closer how?"

"Not clearer. Closer." She kept walking. "It is the difference between remembering a room and standing in a corridor you think is near it. I have fire and I have a name. I am now somewhere that those two things do not feel like they belong to somebody else’s life." A pause. "That is all it is. Do not build anything on it."

"I’m not."

"You are considering it."

"...A bit."

"Don’t."

---

The red got worse as they went.

It stopped being cracks. By the last five hundred metres there were seams of it running under whole sections of the road, long unbroken lines of dull red glowing up through the stone, and where the paving had lifted you could see down into it — and it went *down*, further than a lamp would have shown, layers of it, in a city that had been dead for longer than anyone could measure.

Cillian stopped once to look into a gap between two flags and then did not do that again.

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** THAT’S THE SAME RED

**[ZeroFan]:** ITS EVERYWHERE

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** ITS NOT COMING FROM THE SOLDIERS. LOOK. THE SOLDIERS ARE COMING FROM IT

**[CorkClimber]:** LOOK UNDER THE ROAD

**[FrontierWife]:** james knows. james knew ten minutes ago

**[GalwayGoblin]:** WHAT THE FUCK IS FLOOR 30

**[MOD]:** Slow mode enabled.

---

The outer gate was open.

Not broken. Not burned through. Two leaves of iron-bound timber standing wide against the inside of the wall with nothing holding them and nothing blocking them, exactly the way a gate stands when somebody has opened it on purpose.

Ronan stopped ten metres short of it.

He had been checking exits since Floor 20 — every room, every corridor, a quiet circuit of where the fallback would be — and James watched him look at that open gate and not like it in a way that a locked one would never have managed.

"I’d rather it was shut," he said.

"Yeah."

"If it’s shut, something’s keeping us out." Ronan shifted his grip. "It’s not shut."

James sent the scout in first.

The skeleton went through the gateway, into the shadow under the wall, and out the other side into the courtyard beyond.

Nothing hit it. Nothing moved. The thread in the back of James’s skull stayed thin and steady and stupid.

He could have Grave Stepped to it. The anchor was right there, forty metres, well inside the range, and he would have arrived in the middle of an unknown courtyard alone and blind for a second with his team on the wrong side of a wall.

He walked in with everybody else instead.

---

The courtyard was enormous and it had survived.

That was the strangest thing about it. Out in the city, every roof had come down. In here the colonnade along the eastern side was still standing, and the flagstones were intact, and the inner keep at the far end had all four walls and most of a roof.

The fire had come to this place and had been refused.

The red under the floor was the brightest it had been all day.

Maeve stopped four steps inside the gate.

Alice stopped at almost exactly the same moment, half a pace behind her, and neither of them said anything.

`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE COMPLETE]`

`[LAST STRONGHOLD REACHED]`

`[MAIN STORYLINE UPDATED]`

Then, underneath it, in a colour the Tower did not usually use:

`[WARNING]`

`[WRATH AUTHORITY DETECTED]`

---

Nobody moved.

James read it twice, and then he turned his head and looked at Alice, because there was nowhere else to look.

She was already staring at it.

Four months of *I do not know enough to name it*. Four months of refusing to give him a word to build a plan on. And the Tower had put it up on the inside of all six of their eyes in two lines and no explanation at all.

"Wrath," said James.

"That’s the name," said Alice.

That was the entire conversation.

---

The red under the courtyard brightened.

It did not rise, and it did not reach for anybody, and nothing burst out of the ground. It simply came up in intensity until every crack in the flagstones was a lit line — and lit lines have direction, and all of them ran the same way.

Every one of them went toward the far end of the courtyard, and the ruined doorway of the inner keep.

Something in that doorway moved.

Alice’s wings opened.

Ronan’s shield came up and he set his feet without being told. Finn shifted onto his shoulder, both axes level. Maeve took eight metres of ground behind them and to the left, exactly where she had stood in a padded hall the day before yesterday. Cillian shook his hands out and stopped talking.

James reached back and closed his hand around the haft of the scythe.

He did not release it.

`[MAIN STORY BOSS DETECTED]`

---

The figure came out of the doorway and stopped at the top of the steps, in the red light coming up through the courtyard floor.

James had seen this three times now. He knew what it looked like.

On Baldwin it had crawled. It had wrapped and climbed and knitted and torn, moved over him like something with its own opinion, flared when he swung and guttered when he was hit. On Floor 28 it had poured off corpses and run for cracks. On Floor 29 it had gone across a hundred and twenty metres of open stone like a thing let off a chain.

It was not doing any of that.

Around the figure at the top of the steps the red sat perfectly still. It lay against the body in a close, even, unmoving layer, no thicker at the shoulders than at the wrists, not crawling, not reaching, not straining anywhere at all.

It looked like something that had never once got away.

And Alice, who had spent two kilometres looking at a burned world, stopped looking at the burned world.