Chapter 319 - 310 — The Same Man I

Chapter 319: Chapter 310 — The Same Man I

He watched it from the strategy room at twenty past eleven at night, on his own, with the lights off.

He had not planned to come back in. He had been in bed with the light out and the phone face down for about nine minutes before he got up, put yesterday’s jumper on and drove across the city, and there was nobody in the building except two security officers and a screener who had fallen asleep at a desk.

James put the Korean feed on the big screen and sat down in front of it.

The picture opened in white.

Then it dropped, and shook for a second while the broadcast stabiliser caught up, and settled.

Ash went across the road in a long skid, black and dry, pushed sideways by wind the stream picked up as a low continuous hiss. Buildings stood on both sides of the picture burned down to their stone frames, and the windows in them were not windows anymore, just dark holes with nothing behind them. Somebody in the Korean party took a step and the microphone got the sound of it — glass and burnt debris going under a boot, dry, brittle, twice.

`[FLOOR 30]`

`[FLOOR 30 — STORY FLOOR]`

`[MAIN STORYLINE ACTIVATED]`

`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: REACH THE LAST STRONGHOLD]`

Word for word.

James did not look at a single one of the five people on that road.

He looked at the ground.

At the flagstones, at the joins between them, at the long cracks running through the sections where the road had gone to dark glass. At the base of the wall on the left of frame where a building had come down into its own footprint.

Nothing.

He dragged the playback back nine seconds and watched it again with his face closer to the screen than it needed to be. Then he ran it forward at half speed and looked at the same stretch of road going away behind them as the camera drifted.

Black stone. Grey ash. No thread of anything in any crack in the picture.

He sat back.

That proved nothing yet and he knew it. Their own Floor 30 had not been lit like a fairground either — he had nearly walked over the first crack himself, and it had been dull enough to miss, and a broadcast compressed everything.

**James:** *when you’re up. korea’s floor 30. watch the ground not the fight.*

He put the phone down and kept watching.

---

They were good.

James had expected that and it was still worth seeing. Their Guardian went to the front at the first intersection without anyone telling him twice and stayed a metre off the corner rather than walking into the open. Their support was inside the shape of the other four the entire time and never once drifted to the edge of it. At the second junction the whole party stopped, and one of them went forward eight steps, and came back, and only then did they cross.

Nobody was showing off. Nobody was sprinting for a time.

They moved like a team who had cleared twenty-nine floors, which was exactly what they were.

And they were walking up the same road.

James recognised the avenue about four minutes in — the width of it, the way it ran dead straight between the collapsed terraces, the long patch where the surface had gone to glass. He knew the shape of the horizon behind them before the camera turned far enough to show the stronghold on it.

Then the barricade.

Same one. The collapsed timber-and-stone wall thrown across the street where it narrowed, knocked down at least twice, exactly where Ronan had said *front* and put his shield in the gap.

`[RUINED SOLDIER]`

`[LEVEL: 46]`

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

`[RUINED GUARD]`

`[LEVEL: 48]`

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

Five and one.

James’s own numbers, on a screen in Dublin, from a floor five thousand kilometres and eight days away.

---

He did not watch the fight.

The Korean Guardian took the two shields at the gap and their frontline handled it properly and it was, by any standard, a good clean engagement.

James watched the corpses.

The first Ruined Soldier went down on the flagstones about six feet from the barricade and the camera swung off it almost immediately, and James dragged the playback back and froze it and went forward one second at a time.

The body lay there.

Nothing came out of it. Nothing gathered on the stone beside it, nothing ran anywhere, nothing found a crack, and the flagstones around it were the same flagstones they had been before it died.

He did the same thing to the next one.

And the Guard.

By the time the Korean party moved off past the barricade, James had watched three separate deaths at one-second intervals, and the total amount of red on Floor 30 remained zero.

---

Maeve came in at ten past one without knocking.

She had a coat on over something she had clearly been asleep in and she did not ask him what was going on, because he had four sections paused across two windows and every one of them was a frozen shot of the ground.

She looked at the screen for about eight seconds.

Then she went to the second console and pulled up their own archive.

"Which timestamp on ours."

"Eleven minutes twelve. The barricade."

She put it up beside the live feed.

Ireland, left. South Korea, right.

Same street. Same broken wall across it. Same angle, near enough, because both teams had come up the same road.

On the left, in the joins between the flagstones and along the base of the fallen terrace, there was a dull red line about a metre long and three or four shorter ones near it, easy to miss if you were not looking for them, and impossible to miss if you were.

On the right there was nothing at all.

Maeve did not say anything.

She marked the timestamp, put it in a column, and started looking for the next one.

---

They worked through it for the next two hours and most of it was boring, which was the correct way for it to be.

The Korean party moved. James found the corresponding place in his own memory, Maeve found the corresponding place in the archive, and they put the two pictures side by side and looked at the floor.

`01:47` — the piles of weapons run together at the tips, at the third defensive position. Ireland: red under the whole of the western kerb. Korea: nothing.

`02:19` — the half-building with no soot on it, glassed on the road side and rough on the other. Ireland: a seam running under the corner of it, bright enough that Cillian had stopped to look into a gap between two flags. Korea: the same corner, the same building, and the same gap, and it was dark.

`03:04` — the fourth barricade, all of them facing the same way. Ireland: red in every crack for forty metres. Korea: black stone.

Maeve’s column had nine entries in it by three in the morning and she had still not said one word about what any of it meant.

---

The public got there in pieces, and later than James expected.

Most of the chat under the Korean stream was doing what a chat does — arguing about their pace against Team Zero’s, arguing about the Guardian’s positioning, arguing about whether being second to a Story Floor counted for anything.

Then, scattered in among it:

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** wasn’t there red under this road on Ireland’s run

**[ArchiveClimber]:** checking the Team Zero VOD now

**[ArchiveClimber]:** same street. 11:12 on the Ireland stream. it’s there

**[ZeroFan]:** SAME STREET. NO RED.

**[user88317]:** ok that’s weird

James closed the chat window.

He did not need two hundred thousand people arriving at his own conclusion in the middle of him testing it.

---

Finn came in at twenty to four because Maeve had put the comparison into the team channel and Finn had never in his life left a message unread.

He stood behind them for four full minutes without saying anything, which was not like him at all.

"It’s the same road."

"It’s the same road," said Maeve.

"And there’s nothing under it."

"Nine places so far."

Finn pulled a chair over.

---

At half four the Korean party came up the last five hundred metres and the stronghold came into frame properly, and James stopped moving.

The walls went up out of the burned city the way he remembered them going up — the only thing on that horizon that was still a building. Black to the parapet on the outer face where the fire had reached it and not got in. Wind pushing black dust along the base of the wall in low streams.

And the gate standing open.

Both leaves, wide, against the inside of the wall, with nothing holding them.

"Ronan didn’t like that," Finn said quietly.

"No."

The Korean Guardian did not like it either. He stopped ten metres short of it in almost exactly the place Ronan had stopped, and James watched a man he had never met stand in the same patch of ash and look at the same open gate and clearly say the same thing to his party.

They went in.

The courtyard came up on the feed.

Colonnade along the eastern side, standing. Flagstones intact. The inner keep at the far end with its ruined doorway and its steps.

Maeve put Ireland’s arrival on the second monitor.

Two courtyards, side by side.

Left: every crack in the flagstones carrying a dull red line, and the whole floor of the place lit faintly from underneath, and Maeve, on that footage, stopping four steps inside the gate because the stone was warm.

Right: grey flagstones, black dust, and nothing.

---

The Korean Guardian shifted forward. The other four spread into their formation.

The figure came out of the doorway.

James had his hand on the playback control and it stopped there.

Same man.

Same weathered face under the same short grey-shot hair. Same plate — the long lines of it across the chest, the pauldrons, the same worn place on the left side where a strap had gone over it for years. Same heavy straight-bladed sword carried low in one hand.

He came out of the same doorway and stopped at the top of the same steps in the same ruined courtyard, and he stood the way he had stood for Team Zero, weight even, no announcement, no shout.

`[MAIN STORY BOSS DETECTED]`

`[THE LAST DEFENDER]`

`[LEVEL: 67]`

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

Every line identical.

And there was no red on him.

Not less of it. Not thinner, not dimmer, not held differently. There was a man in armour standing at the top of a set of steps and the air around him was air.

James paused the live feed.

Maeve, without being asked, went into the archive and found the frame — the one from six weeks ago, the first sight of him, the moment James had looked at the light before he looked at the man.

She put it on the left.

On the left, the same face, the same armour, the same sword, and lying against all of it in one even unmoving layer from wrist to shoulder to throat, the red.

On the right, only the man.

Neither of them said anything for about fifteen seconds.

---

The Korean party engaged and James made himself watch the fight this time.

The Last Defender came down the steps at a walk, exactly as he had, and went through the Korean frontline the same way — the short economical turn of the wrist that put a weapon aside and cost him nothing, the feet always moving forward through the exchange, the refusal to be drawn wide.

He was extremely good. He put their Guardian back two metres in the first ten seconds and made their second frontliner abandon a committed strike.

Nothing in his fighting was new. Everything he did, he had done to Ronan and Finn six weeks ago.

Then one of them got a real wound into him — up under the ribs on the open side while their Guardian held the sword line.

`[THE LAST DEFENDER — HP: 95,000 → 88,200]`

James did not look at the number.

He looked at the wound.

Blood came out of it and ran down the plate. The man’s weight changed on that side, slightly, the way a man’s weight changes when something has gone through him. He kept fighting and he adjusted the way he held the sword.

Nothing gathered around it.

Nothing thickened. Nothing pulled in from the shoulders. Nothing banked on his chest and waited for him to decide who to spend it on, and thirty seconds later the Korean support was still standing exactly where she had been standing, untouched, uninterrupted, doing her job.

The fight simply carried on.

Maeve rewound theirs.

She put Alice’s first strike up — the dive off the colonnade, the fold of the wing, the red-gold blade going in under the arm — and then the four seconds afterwards, where the even layer stopped being even and everything on the man’s back began sliding toward the hole Alice had made and thickening there until it was the size of a shield.

And then the next second, where he turned his head, found Maeve at the back of the courtyard, and let it go.

She let it run to the point where the barrier came apart and she went off her feet.

Then she stopped it and let the Korean feed run again, where a man had been opened under the ribs and was bleeding and was nothing else.

"Right," she said. "That’s it. That’s the whole difference on one screen."

---

James did not need the rest of the fight.

He watched another two minutes of it anyway, and the boss stayed dangerous — he broke their formation once and their Guardian had to physically drag somebody backwards out of a bad position — and the point held. He was a Level 67 Story Floor boss and he was hard. He was hard in an ordinary way that a team of that quality could work out.

Team Zero had not fought that.

"Alright," James said. "Say it."

"I’m not saying anything that isn’t in front of me."

"Say what’s in front of you, then."

Maeve looked at the two frozen frames.

"Our Floor 30 had something in it that South Korea’s Floor 30 doesn’t."

"That’s all?"

"That’s all I’ve got, James. That’s *all* I’ve got."