Chapter 304 - 295 — What You Give Him I

Chapter 304: Chapter 295 — What You Give Him I

’[MAIN STORY BOSS DETECTED]`

`[THE LAST DEFENDER]`

`[LEVEL: 67]`

`[HP: 95,000 / 95,000]`

That was all of it.

No class. No skill list. No affiliation, no origin, nothing about the light he was standing in. Twenty-five floors of Tower panels had trained James to expect a paragraph and he got four lines and a number.

He did not look at the man’s face first.

He looked at the red.

It lay against the body in one even layer, wrist to shoulder to throat, and it was not doing anything. It was not climbing. It was not knitting. It was not reaching for the cracks in the flagstones it had come out of, and it was not straining anywhere, and when the figure shifted his weight at the top of the steps it moved with him exactly the way a coat moves with a man.

On Baldwin it had been a fight. Something wrapping a body and being worn badly.

This was not that.

"James," said Maeve.

"I see it."

"No — he’s—"

He came down the steps.

---

He came down them at a walk, with a heavy straight-bladed sword held low in one hand, and he did not shout and did not run and did not do a single thing to announce himself.

He was into Ronan before Maeve finished the sentence.

Ronan got the shield across. He did not stand flat — he angled it, took the sword on the face and turned enough of it away that his front knee held — and he was still shoved back half a metre with his boots grinding on stone.

"He’s *good*," Ronan said.

Finn came into the commitment the way he had four hundred times.

The Last Defender did not correct late and did not correct fast. He simply turned the axe away with a short movement of the wrist that cost him nothing, kept his feet moving forward through the whole exchange, and pushed both of them backward together.

Ronan gave a metre. Finn had to go with him or be alone.

He was not berserk. He was not enhanced-looking. He fought like a man who had done this for forty years, and the red on him had not so far done anything at all.

---

Alice did not wait for that to develop.

She went up while Ronan and Finn had his eyes, crossed the courtyard above the colonnade, folded one wing at the last instant to drop the angle, and came down through his guard from the side he was not turned toward.

The red-gold blade went in under the arm.

`[THE LAST DEFENDER — HP: 95,000 → 78,400]`

Sixteen thousand six hundred.

It was the single biggest hit anybody in Team Zero had landed on anything, ever, and James saw the wound open and saw it stay open, and knew before he had finished thinking it that nothing was going to close it.

That was the one thing they had been sure of since Caerleon. The red did not heal.

It did something else.

The even layer around the man stopped being even.

Everything that had been lying flat across his shoulders and his back began to move — pulling in, sliding across the plate toward the wound Alice had made, and thickening there, and brightening, until the whole left side of him was carrying a mass of red about the size of a shield.

"That’s new," Cillian said.

The Last Defender did not attack Alice.

He turned his head, found Maeve at the back of the formation with her staff up, and let it go.

---

The mass tore off the wound in one piece and crossed thirty metres of courtyard in a straight line.

Maeve got something up. She was fast and it was not enough — the barrier held for about a third of a second, came apart in the middle, and the rest of it went through and took her off her feet.

She hit the flagstones and slid.

"MAEVE—"

"*Position,*" she shouted back, which was not the same as saying she was fine.

She got up on one arm. The staff was two metres away and she had to crawl to it, and when she got upright her left side was not working properly and she held it that way for the rest of the fight.

Alice had put sixteen thousand into him.

Maeve had paid for it.

Nobody in the courtyard understood why yet.

---

The Last Defender did not stand still while they worked it out.

He came at Ronan again, and this time he was not trying to break Ronan. He was trying to get past him, angling every exchange toward the left-hand side of the courtyard, toward the woman who was down on one knee getting her staff back.

Ronan understood it and got in the way of it.

Finn attacked the sword side to make him deal with something.

And James sent both skeletons in — not to hurt him, because two skeletons hurting a Level 67 was a joke, but to be *in the way*, to make him spend a movement.

He made both of them last about four seconds. The first one he cut through at the hip without changing pace. The second one caught his forearm and he broke it against the ground.

Then he kept advancing.

And that was James’s whole board gone, because there were no bodies in this courtyard. There had been no bodies anywhere in this city. He had walked in with two skeletons and there was nothing on this floor that was ever going to give him a third.

"Cillian," James said.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

Not the big one. Cillian did not have big ones to spare and had not since Floor 24, and the bolt he put into the Last Defender’s advancing shoulder was tight and cheap and completely correct.

`[THE LAST DEFENDER — HP: 78,400 → 74,900]`

Three and a half thousand.

The advance stopped.

And the red moved again — pulled toward the burn on the shoulder plate, and gathered, and thickened.

But not nearly as much.

It was maybe a fifth of what had come off him after Alice, a lump the size of a fist rather than a shield, and it sat there for a full second while the man decided.

Then he turned and put it into Ronan.

It hit the shield square. Ronan took most of it on the boss and the rest across his shoulder and went four metres backward across the flagstones, upright the whole way, boots screaming, and stopped just short of the colonnade.

He was up. He was not hurt the way Maeve was hurt.

He was also nowhere near the front line anymore.

---

Maeve saw it from her knees.

"*Stop hitting him.*"

"What?"

"Everyone — *drop your output, right now.*" She hauled herself upright against the staff. "Alice hit him for sixteen and it nearly took my head off. Cillian hit him for three and a half and it moved Ronan four metres. It’s not random. It’s *ours*. Whatever we put into him, he keeps, and then he throws it."

Finn was already inside the sword.

"Then let’s find out."

He did not use a skill. He did not use his weight. He made one shallow cut across the outside of the Last Defender’s thigh — the sort of thing Finn did to keep a man honest, worth almost nothing.

`[THE LAST DEFENDER — HP: 74,900 → 73,700]`

Twelve hundred.

A thread of red gathered at the cut. Barely a handful of it.

Finn was standing right there, well inside reach, the obvious target and the man who had just done it.

The Last Defender sent it at Cillian.

Cillian got an arm up and it took him off his feet and dumped him on his back six metres away, and when he sat up his good hand was shaking and he was holding it against his chest.

"I’m grand," he said, in the voice of a man who was not.

"Can you cast?"

"...Small ones."

That was the second half of it, and everybody had seen it at the same time.

He did not throw it back at whoever hit him.

He threw it at whoever he wanted.

---

James stood behind the line with a sword in his hand and no corpses on the floor and did the arithmetic.

They could hurt him. That was not the problem. The damage stayed — no healing, no regeneration, the wound under his arm was still open and still bleeding and he was down twenty-one thousand three hundred.

The problem was that every single point of it came back.

Hit him hard and they armed him. Hit him softly and he had all day, and they did not — Maeve could not hold her left side up, Cillian was down to interruptions, Ronan had taken one discharge and was going to take more, and the man had not yet done anything that looked like effort.

Alice came back to the line and set her feet, and James knew exactly what she was about to do.

"Don’t."

She turned her head.

"He is at seventy-three thousand," she said. "I can take twenty out of him."

"I know you can."

"Then—"

"That’s the problem." James did not look away from the fight. "You hit him for sixteen and he nearly killed Maeve with it. Twenty is worse. If you go in and don’t finish him — and you won’t, not from seventy-three — then he’s holding twenty thousand of your strength and he gets to pick which one of us he spends it on. And it won’t be you." He glanced at her. "He’s not stupid. He’ll take Cillian off the floor and then we’ve nothing at all."

Alice looked at the man in the middle of the courtyard for a long moment.

"So I am to hit him gently."

"You’re to stop him going anywhere."

She did not like it. James could see exactly how much she did not like it.

She did it anyway.

---

And she was extraordinary at it.

She stopped trying to kill him and started closing doors. Every time he angled left toward Maeve, Alice was in the gap before he took the second step, wings half open, taking the sword line on her forearm and giving nothing back. Every time he tried to break the pocket Ronan and Finn were holding, the route he wanted stopped existing.

She hit him twice in four minutes and neither one was worth more than nine hundred, and both times the red that gathered was so small he did not bother spending it.

The Last Defender adjusted inside about thirty seconds.

He stopped waiting.

Once it became clear that nobody was going to hand him anything worth throwing, he simply started fighting them — properly, with the sword, at a level none of them had faced since a field outside Caerleon. He worked around Finn’s guard twice. He hit Ronan’s shield in the same place four times running until the boss started to deform. He put the point through the outside of Finn’s arm and left it there long enough to matter.

`[THE LAST DEFENDER — HP: 73,700 → 71,000]`

Two and a half minutes of everything Team Zero had, for two thousand seven hundred.

And Maeve could not put a barrier up bigger than a door, and Cillian had interruptions and nothing else, and Ronan’s shield arm was going.

"This isn’t working," Finn said, backing out with blood coming down his sleeve.

"No," said James.

---

He had been watching the red the entire time and he made himself say the three things out loud in his own head, exactly, without smoothing them.

On Floor 25 the released scythe had cut Baldwin’s reinforcement and it had failed to knit across the gap — twice, reaching and failing — before settling thinner than it had been.

On Floor 28 it had peeled off a Heavy Floor Soldier’s arm and recoiled from the edge and could not close.

On Floor 29 it had come off a living Captain in pieces and run for the exit rather than stay under the blade.

Three floors. The same weapon. And every time, the thing it had done was not to the man.

It was to the light.

"Maeve."

"Go."

"We stop trying to kill him."

She got it in about a second and a half, which was why she was Maeve.

"You want to cut the pile."

"I want to cut the pile."

`[AUTHORITY RELEASE ACTIVATED]`

`[TARGET: AZRAEL’S BROKEN SCYTHE]`

`[DURATION: 30 MINUTES]`

The missing half of the blade came into existence in black light along the broken edge, and the temperature in James’s hands dropped, and the sound of the courtyard took one step further away.

---

The Last Defender stopped.

He had not stopped for Alice coming out of the sky. He had not stopped when a Fallen Divinity opened his ribs. He had walked through two skeletons and a lightning strike without changing pace.

He stopped for this.

His head came round and his eyes went to the black blade, and they stayed there, and for the first time since he had come out of that doorway there was something on his face that was not composure.

Not fear. James was near enough to be sure of that.

He knew what it was.

And around him — without him lifting the sword, without him moving at all — the even red layer shifted. It went across his chest in a slow ripple, from one shoulder to the other, like water in a carried bowl.

He had not told it to do that.

Alice saw it too. James felt her go still on his right.

Neither of them said anything.

---

"Positions," said Maeve. "Exactly like the hall. *Exactly.* Ronan, you’re the front and you do not chase him. Finn, opposite side, feet and hands, don’t try to hurt him. Cillian, small ones only, I don’t care how it looks. Alice—"

"Whichever way he runs," said Alice.

"Whichever way he runs. James—"

"I know."

"You start early."

"I know."