Chapter 323 - 314 — Seven Days I

Chapter 323: Chapter 314 — Seven Days I

The reinforced hall smelled of rubber and hot metal.

It was the smaller one, the one they had built for people who broke things — pale scratch marks fanned across the floor in long arcs, wall panels along the eastern side dented and replaced and dented again, the air conditioning running cold enough that James’s forearms had gone to gooseflesh inside two minutes of standing still.

There was a faint electrical smell already. That was Cillian, forty feet away, doing nothing in particular with his hands.

James stood in the middle of the floor with Durendal in his right hand.

Across from him were the other four.

"Properly," he said.

"James—"

"Properly, Finn. Not a drill. Not a rep. I want you actually trying to put me on the ground, all four of you, and I want you to keep doing it until I ask you to stop."

Nobody argued with him.

They spread out without discussing it, because they had not needed to discuss it since about Floor 12. Ronan took the centre with the shield up. Finn drifted right, off his shoulder, both axes low. Cillian went wide and back where he could punish James for looking at the frontline. Maeve stood behind all of them with her staff planted and did not do anything at all.

No Alice. No Fossor. No skeletons.

Just a sword, and nobody in between.

---

Ronan came first, and he did not swing.

He walked, and the shield came with him, and the space James had to stand in got smaller. That was all. It was the least dramatic thing on the floor and it was the reason Ronan had been the front of Team Zero for two years.

James went right to get out from under it.

Finn was already there.

The axe came in on a line James did not see start. He got Durendal across it and the impact went straight through the flat of the blade into his wrist and up into his elbow, and his hand opened involuntarily and closed again a quarter-second later, and he lost half a metre.

He tried to circle out.

Ronan had shifted. The route was gone.

And Cillian, who had been waiting exactly this long, hit him from forty feet.

James went to the anchor.

`[GRAVE STEP ACTIVATED]`

`[MANA COST: 120]`

The far side of the hall arrived, and then the floor jumped under him — the little sick lurch of a world that had not caught up, less than it used to be but still there, still an entire fraction of a second where James Ganner was a stationary object.

His eyes found Cillian too late.

The lightning caught him across the ribs and threw him five metres.

His shoulder hit first, then his hip, and he skidded. The sharp bleachy smell of ozone got to him before the pain did — a full second of *that smells like a hospital* before his side lit up and he made a noise into the floor.

Finn was already crossing the hall.

James got up.

---

He did better once he stopped trying to leave.

That was the thing he found somewhere around the fourth exchange: every time he tried to make space, Ronan took it, and every time he arrived somewhere new, Cillian was waiting for the lag. So he stopped going backwards and started going through.

He put Durendal into Finn’s guard hard enough to shift him a step. He read the shield edge coming and was not there. He got a Necro Blast off on the diagonal that made Cillian break his own footing to avoid it, which was the first thing all morning that had cost them anything.

And the second he committed to it, Maeve moved.

`[HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]`

The violet ring settled into his shoulder while his weight was still travelling.

Finn came at the mark. James turned to meet him, which was correct, which was the only thing he could have done, which was exactly the point of putting the mark there.

Ronan hit his legs with the bottom edge of the shield from the other side.

James went down hard enough that the impact came up through his teeth.

"Round," said Maeve.

---

Nobody told him he had done well.

He lay on his back on the reinforced floor with his chest going like a bellows and sweat running cold down the side of his face into his ear, and looked at the ceiling.

The damage had been fine.

That was the maddening part. Every time he had actually caught Finn, it had hurt. The Necro Blast had made Cillian move. If any one of those had landed properly on a single opponent, that opponent would have been in serious trouble.

He had just never once been able to get to the place where he could use them before somebody put him on the floor.

James opened his Status.

`[JAMES GANNER — LEVEL 43]`

`[STRENGTH: 64 | AGILITY: 87 | INTELLIGENCE: 156 | ENDURANCE: 91 | LUCK: 57]`

`[FREE STAT POINTS: 15]`

Fifteen.

Ten since Floor 27 and five off Floor 30, sitting in a box for months while he waited to find out what the Tower was going to ask him for.

It had turned out not to be the Tower.

He looked at Intelligence for about two seconds, which was where every one of those points had been quietly headed for half a year. More mana. More Necro Blast. A bigger board, a longer day, another eight hundred in the tank for hour six of a floor.

He was not going to be on a floor.

He was going to be on a platform with one man, one sword and no corpses on the ground until he made some.

`[ALLOCATE — AGILITY +9]`

`[ALLOCATE — ENDURANCE +6]`

`[CONFIRM?]`

James confirmed.

`[STRENGTH: 64 | AGILITY: 96 | INTELLIGENCE: 156 | ENDURANCE: 97 | LUCK: 57]`

`[FREE STAT POINTS: 0]`

Nothing happened.

The world did not slow down. Light did not change. He got up off the floor and his ribs still hurt where Cillian had put him into it and his wrist still ached from the first axe, and the only difference at all was that when he decided to put his feet somewhere, they went there with slightly less argument.

His mana ceiling had not moved a point. He had chosen that.

"Again," he said.

---

The second round went the same way and took longer.

Finn came from the same kind of angle — the blind side, off Ronan’s shoulder, the one that had opened James’s guard inside four seconds the first time.

James was there half a beat sooner.

That was all it was. Durendal was already in the line instead of arriving into it, and the axe hit steel instead of ribs, and the impact went through his arm again but he kept the ground.

Ronan still moved him. Cillian still nearly caught him twice. Maeve still made four people feel like six.

But he lasted about ninety seconds longer, and somewhere in the middle of it he got Finn’s guard properly open and had a clean line at his chest and did not take it, because it was Finn, and Finn saw him not take it and said "oh, *don’t* do that" in a genuinely offended voice.

Then Ronan put him down again.

"Better," said Maeve.

"It’s not better."

"It’s ninety seconds better."

---

He changed the test after lunch.

The four of them cleared the floor and stood behind the observation glass, and Alice came in and stopped about fifteen metres away with her arms folded.

James put his palm flat on the reinforced floor.

`[UNEARTH ACTIVATED]`

The whole hall trembled. Dust came up out of every seam in the floor at once, and a section of reinforced panel three metres to James’s left lifted, cracked, and broke upward as Fossor came through it — dirt and concrete dust sheeting off its back, filling the air with the smell of broken stone.

It settled beside him, and then it was gone again, and the floor closed over it badly.

"They’ll bill you for that," said Cillian, through the intercom.

"Both of you," James said. "At me. Together. Don’t hold back for me and don’t stop when I go down."

Alice unfolded her arms.

"You are certain."

"No."

"Good."

---

She folded her wings in tight to keep them off the walls, and the casualness went out of her the instant she started moving.

James got Durendal up and did not really get it up in time.

The impact went through the sword and into both his hands and his fingers went numb around the grip, and his boots scraped four metres backwards across the floor before he stopped.

Then the floor moved under him.

He felt it in his soles first — a small deep shudder that had nothing to do with anything above ground — and jumped sideways without deciding to.

Fossor came up through the place he had been standing. Fragments of reinforced flooring snapped upward around it and rained back down.

Alice was already following him into the gap.

Her wings pushed air against his face hard enough to make his eyes water, and Durendal rang and kept ringing in his hands, and he had about a third of a second to choose between the thing above and the thing below.

He Grave Stepped.

The world jerked, and Alice was turning toward the anchor before he had properly landed on it.

He got Necro Blast off at contact range purely to make space.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

The grey discharge went off between them and Alice went back two metres and was not remotely inconvenienced by it.

And Fossor had gone.

That was the part James did not have an answer for. The pressure at the back of his skull told him it existed and told him nothing at all about where, and the floor was a floor, and it was going to stop being a floor at some point in the next few seconds directly underneath him.

So he stopped looking at Alice’s hands and started reading the ground.

The small trembles. The dust moving in the cracks. The change in the way the surface pushed back against his boots.

That turned out to be the whole value of the session.

Alice made him watch above. Fossor made him watch below. Neither of them cared what he was doing about the other one, and for eleven minutes James had to hold two entirely separate threats in his head while moving, casting and staying alive.

He got it wrong at the end.

He read the floor, moved away from where he was sure Fossor was coming up, and moved directly into Alice.

Her hand closed round his weapon arm above the elbow.

The next thing that happened was the wall, and Durendal was trapped uselessly between his own chest and hers, and it was completely over.

"Round," said Maeve, through the glass.

Alice stepped back and let him go.

She was not out of breath. James’s shirt was stuck to him and he was breathing through his mouth and he could not entirely feel his right hand.

"Again in ten minutes," he said.