Chapter 324 - 315 — Seven Days II

Chapter 324: Chapter 315 — Seven Days II

The week went like that, and it stopped being interesting to anybody watching very quickly, which was the correct outcome.

Four on one in the mornings.

Finn changed his opening angle on day three because James had learned the first one. Ronan stopped leaving him escape lanes at all and made him fight in a box. Maeve started holding Hexlight Brand for eleven, twelve, fifteen seconds instead of using it on the first commitment, because James had begun waiting for it and she was not going to reward that. Cillian gave up on everything else and simply attacked the instant after every Grave Step, every single time, until James stopped Grave Stepping to obvious places.

Alice and Fossor in the afternoons.

Fossor tore open flooring that had been replaced the previous evening, twice. Alice put James across the hall on the Wednesday hard enough that Maeve stopped the session. On the Thursday, for the first time, James felt the floor go under his left boot and moved off it while getting Durendal up into Alice’s line at the same time, and did both, and did not get hit by either.

Alice beat him about forty seconds later.

Nobody in the building pretended that was going to change.

---

Outside Guild Zero, the thing was becoming enormous.

The TRB confirmed the venue on the Monday afternoon and the country lost its mind.

Croke Park. Eighty-two thousand three hundred seats.

Not an arena. Not a Bureau facility. The biggest stadium in Ireland, with an All-Ireland fixture moved to accommodate it, for two men who had signed a document with the words *death of opposing challenger* on it.

---

**Tuesday, 09:59.**

A man in an office in Sandyford had the ticket page open behind a spreadsheet he was not looking at.

The clock hit ten.

He clicked, and the page went white, and then a queue appeared.

**YOU ARE IN A QUEUE. 41,388 PEOPLE AHEAD OF YOU.**

He said something out loud that made the person at the next desk look over.

The number went down by about four hundred in the first minute. His phone lit up on the desk beside him — *any luck* — *no* — *im 60k back* — *my brothers in at 9k* — and he watched the counter crawl and did not touch the spreadsheet again for fifty minutes.

---

A woman on the top deck of a bus on the North Circular had it on her phone with the brightness up because of the glare, refreshing a page that told her not to refresh.

Her position went from 68,000 to 61,000 and then stopped moving for four minutes.

---

In a house in Coolock there were three laptops and two phones on the kitchen table, all in the same queue, and a fourteen-year-old shouting up the stairs that his mother’s one was moving fastest and would she come down.

They got through on the mother’s.

By then the lower stands were gone.

They took four in the upper tier, on the Hill end, near the back, at a price that made the father put his head in his hands. Nobody argued about it.

---

The seats went in a specific order, the way they always did.

Lower stands first, in under nine minutes. Then the premium seating. Then the good upper-level blocks. Screenshots started going up almost immediately — seat maps with green boxes on them, order confirmations with the surnames blurred out — and underneath them, hundreds of people saying they had reached the payment page and watched the seats disappear while the card was processing.

At 11:47 the page changed.

**SOLD OUT**

Eighty-two thousand three hundred people had bought a ticket to sit in the rain and watch two men fight until one of them was dead.

The official broadcast went to international distribution the same afternoon.

---

The coverage did not stop after that.

Every channel had the same forty seconds of footage and used it every hour. The function room. The insult. James crossing the floor. The crack, and the shutters. Cormac coming up on one elbow with blood on his teeth, laughing. The declaration. The signature.

And then, cut against it, the newer material — James on Floor 25 with a broken scythe, James on Floor 30, James standing in a courtyard beside a woman with black wings, world-first, world-first, world-first.

And Cormac on a step outside a Bureau office in the wind, perfectly calm, asking for the writ to be enforced.

**SEVEN DAYS UNTIL GANNER BLOOD WRIT**

**CAN CORMAC GANNER KILL THE WORLD’S LEADING CHALLENGER?**

**JAMES GANNER RETURNS TO CROKE PARK — THIS TIME FOR BLOOD**

**GANNER CORP AGAIN DISTANCES ITSELF FROM CORMAC’S CHALLENGE**

---

The betting markets opened on the Wednesday.

James was the favourite from the first minute and the price only got shorter as the week went on, because eighty per cent of the money in Ireland had watched him clear Floor 31 on a Tuesday night.

Cormac was the underdog and he was not a joke. Nobody was offering silly numbers on him. He was a registered Challenger with a real record, and the analysts who actually did this for a living kept saying the same careful thing in slightly different ways: *we know a great deal about one of these men and almost nothing about the other.*

And underneath all of it, on every panel show, in every pub, on every phone in the country, sat the question that nobody could answer and everybody kept asking.

Why would Cormac Ganner reopen a death match against the world’s leading Challenger if he did not think he could win it?

---

James did not watch any of it.

On the Friday evening, sitting against the wall of the combat hall with a towel over his head and his sword arm shaking, he got told anyway.

"Do you want to know how much money’s on this?" said Finn.

"No."

"It’s a genuinely stupid amount."

"Right."

"Like, national-scandal stupid."

James lifted the towel enough to look at him.

"Does it pay me more if they’re right?"

"...No."

"Then it’s not information." He put the towel back down. "Ten minutes."

---

The last days went past in things replacing other things.

Fresh wall panels going in on the eastern side while a technician swore quietly at the bolts. The bruise across James’s ribs going from black to a bad green. Fossor putting a new crack through flooring that had been laid on Wednesday. The smell of the hall, which had stopped being rubber and metal about four days ago and was now mostly sweat and would be until somebody opened it up.

Cillian sitting on the floor with his back against the wall after a four-on-one, drinking water with both hands because one of them was not enough.

And Maeve, on the Saturday, calling it at twenty past six when James wanted another round — looking at him, and at the clock, and saying no, and not explaining why, because they had all seen people train an injury into themselves the week before something that mattered.

---

**Sunday.**

The rain came through at about eleven and stopped by one, and left every pavement in Dublin shining under a flat grey afternoon.

In a pub off Dorset Street the wet coats were three deep on the backs of the chairs and the room smelled of beer and fried food and damp wool. Every television in the place was on the TRB pre-fight broadcast, and the sound was up on two of them, and nobody could hear either.

The graphic filled the screen.

**JAMES GANNER**

**vs**

**CORMAC GANNER**

The odds sat underneath it.

"Twenty on James," said a man at the bar, thumbing at his phone. "Twenty. Done."

"You’ll get about a pound back."

"I’ll get my pound back and I’ll be right."

His friend was scrolling the other price. "See, I’m having Cormac."

"You are not."

"For the money. Look at the money."

"He’s fighting the man who cleared *thirty-one floors*, Ciarán—"

"And he *asked* for it." Ciarán put the phone down. "That’s what nobody wants to say. Nobody walks into a fight where you’re not allowed to give up, against *him*, on purpose, for the crack. He’s got something."

"He’s got a death wish is what he’s got."

"He’s had two years."

"James has Alice—"

"I know James has Alice."

A woman two tables over turned round in her seat. "Sorry — he’d want to be quick, though, wouldn’t he? Because if it goes long, that’s a hundred summons and a fella under the ground and a—"

"That’s what I’m *saying*," said the first man.

"No, you’re saying it’s over in a minute. I’m saying it’s over in a minute if he *makes* it a minute."

On the screen, the host was telling the country that late money was still coming in heavily on James, and that Cormac was attracting just enough to keep the market honest.

---

Two of them came up Jones’ Road at half four with the tickets on their phones.

The stadium came up over the houses the way it always did, all at once, bigger than the street it stood in — and the street was already full. People moving in one direction in a slow thick current, six and eight abreast, spilling off the footpaths.

Vendors were shouting from folding tables. Someone had crates of unofficial Guild Zero shirts, black with the wrong logo on them, three for twenty. Somebody else had scarves, half in Guild Zero colours and half — genuinely — with GANNER printed on them, which was funny in a way nobody was going to be able to explain to a tourist.

Homemade signs went up above the heads of the crowd. **FINISH IT JAMES.** **CROKE PARK 82,300 — CORMAC 1.** One that just said **NO SURRENDER**, which the two of them could not work out the allegiance of at all.

Phones everywhere, held up, filming the crowd, filming the stadium, filming nothing.

Garda on the barriers at the top of the road and TRB personnel in high-vis at every gate, and traffic that had stopped being traffic an hour ago.

The air smelled of chip fat and diesel and wet concrete.

Their tickets scanned green, and the turnstile clacked twice, and they were gone inside.

---

The TRB broadcast came from a gantry above the Hogan Stand with the bowl of the stadium filling up behind them.

There were three of them at the desk.

"He’s the world-first clear of thirty-one floors and I’m not going to pretend otherwise," the first one said. "James Ganner is the strongest publicly documented Challenger alive. That’s not a prediction, it’s a fact, and it’s why the market looks like it does."

"And that’s exactly the problem with the market," said the second, immediately. "Every number on that screen is built out of what we *know*, and we only know one of these men. We have thirty-one floors of James Ganner on tape. What have we got on Cormac?"

"He’s registered—"

"He’s registered. That’s it. He has not streamed. He has not given an interview. He turned up outside a Bureau office one morning and asked for a death match, and everything else about the last two years of that man’s life is a blank page."

The third host brought it back to the beginning, briefly, because they had to: a family, a function room, a punch, an insult about a dead man, a document with two signatures on it.

They did not spend long on the brother. They did not need to. Everybody watching already understood that this was not sport.

Behind them, the green gaps in the stands kept closing.

The noise had stopped being conversation about twenty minutes earlier and had become one continuous thing, a wall of it, rising and falling without ever going away.

The viewer count on the broadcast graphic went past forty million and kept climbing, and the coverage cut, for a few seconds each, to a sports bar in Chicago with every screen on it, to a hall in Seoul where six hundred people were watching it on a wall projection at three in the morning, to a pub in Manchester where somebody had a Guild Zero flag over the window.

An Irish family argument, on eleven time zones.

---

Then they showed the pitch.

The grass was still there around the outside, dark and heavy with the morning’s rain, mown in stripes for a match that was not going to be played.

And in the middle of it, they had built a battlefield.

A reinforced combat platform, pale grey, close to sixty metres across — big enough that two people standing at opposite ends of it were properly far apart. Big enough for wings. Big enough for something to move underneath it. Big enough that neither man was going to be able to end this by simply being nearer than the other one.

Around it, in a ring, stood the containment barriers: three layers of transparent panelling with the faint refraction of a live field between them, going up thirty metres and curving in at the top.

Nothing in that barrier was there to restrain James or Cormac.

The commentators said so, plainly, twice. There were no rules being enforced inside it. The barrier existed because eighty-two thousand people were sitting in a bowl around two Challengers who were legally permitted to use absolutely everything they had.

TRB containment crews stood along the outside of it at eight-metre intervals. Medical teams waited at the Canal End despite the fact that the writ had a death condition. Camera rigs sat on all four corners of the platform, and above it, high enough not to interfere, four drones held station.

The screens at both ends of the ground were the height of a house.

---

**BETTING CLOSES IN 60 SECONDS.**

In the pub off Dorset Street, Ciarán changed his mind twice, put twenty on James, took it off, and put it back on Cormac at forty seconds with his friend howling at him.

Somewhere in the upper tier of the Hill, a woman submitted hers with the phone held over her head to get signal, at thirty-one seconds.

On four continents, several hundred thousand people did the same thing at more or less the same moment.

`[BETTING CLOSED]`

There was no more money to be put anywhere.

There was only the fight.