Chapter 325 - 316 — Seven Days III (Bonus)

Chapter 325: Chapter 316 — Seven Days III (Bonus)

The stadium lights dropped.

The noise doubled inside about a second and a half, eighty thousand people going from loud to something else entirely, and the giant screens at both ends went black.

Then white letters.

**CORMAC GANNER**

The sound that came back was not one thing. There were cheers, real ones, a solid block of them from the Cusack side. There were boos, louder. There were several thousand people simply shouting the surname because it was theirs too.

Phones came up all over the ground, thousands of little white screens in the dark, all of them pointed at the tunnel.

Cormac walked out.

He came out on his own with nobody around him.

He was in combat gear, and it was used — not new, not ceremonial, not the sort of thing somebody’s public relations office picks. Layered light armour with the finish worn off the forearms and a repair seam across one shoulder plate that had not been made pretty afterward. He was heavier through the shoulders and the back than the man in the function room footage had been. He moved like somebody who had been doing this every day for two years.

He did not lift a hand. He did not look at the stands. He did not slow down at any point between the tunnel mouth and the barrier.

Eighty-two thousand people made the biggest noise of the afternoon and Cormac Ganner walked through the middle of it like a man going to work.

The containment entrance opened, and he stepped through, and it sealed behind him.

He stood at his end of the platform with his hands at his sides and waited.

The screens went black again.

---

**JAMES GANNER**

---

In the tunnel, it had been a muffled roar through concrete for twenty minutes.

Then it was not muffled.

James felt it come up through the floor into his boots before he properly heard it — a physical thing, a vibration in the soles and then in his chest, the sound of a stadium arriving all at once through a hundred and fifty metres of passageway.

The tunnel smelled of cold concrete and equipment oil.

An official at the mouth of it looked at a screen, then at James, and gave him a nod.

James walked.

It got louder with every step, less like weather and more like a crowd, and then he came out of the mouth of the tunnel and into the light.

The cold hit him first. Dublin in the evening, damp air off wet grass, on skin that had spent a week in a hot hall.

Then the size of it.

He had been in this ground before. He had been in it as a boy with his father, twice, in the upper stand at the Canal End with a bag of sweets.

He had never once stood on the grass and looked up.

The stands went up and up in tiers until the people at the top stopped being people and became colour and movement, and the whole bowl of it was full, every seat, all the way round, and camera flashes flickered through the lower blocks like something electrical shorting out.

On the screen at the far end, James Ganner walked across a stadium four storeys high.

Above him, the drones hung in the floodlight.

And in the middle of all of it, on a pale grey platform inside three walls of glass, one man stood waiting.

James walked to the barrier.

The entrance opened, and he went through, and it sealed behind him.

The sound changed instantly. Not gone — nothing that big could be gone — but flattened, pushed back, dulled through the containment field into something that pressed on the outside of his ears rather than getting into them.

For the first time in ten minutes, James could hear his own breathing.

---

Cormac was about forty metres away.

They looked at each other properly for the first time in two years.

He was calm. That was still the thing. There was nothing in his face at all — no sneer, no performance, none of the loose theatrical contempt he had been wearing the night he did this on purpose.

He walked forward about ten metres and stopped, and the crowd noise beyond the glass went up in a way that suggested somebody had put both of their faces on the screen at once.

"He’d have been thirty last month," Cormac said. "Derek."

James did not answer.

He had spent a week getting hit by four people and a Fallen Divinity, and he knew this move better than he knew any of Finn’s angles, because he had walked into it once in front of two hundred witnesses and forty cameras and it had cost him everything since.

Cormac waited about three seconds for something.

It did not come.

Something crossed his face then — not disappointment exactly. Something more like a man revising a document.

"Fair enough," he said, and went back to his mark.

---

Two officials in TRB grey came to the edge of the barrier and read the confirmation aloud, and both men acknowledged it.

There were no combat restrictions. No prohibited classes, no prohibited equipment, no restrictions on summoned or contracted entities belonging to either Challenger. Nothing either man owned was excluded from the platform.

Nobody outside it could touch it.

There was no surrender.

The screens at both ends of Croke Park changed together.

`[CHALLENGER BLOOD WRIT]`

`[JAMES GANNER vs CORMAC GANNER]`

`[SURRENDER: PROHIBITED]`

`[VICTORY CONDITION: DEATH OF OPPOSING CHALLENGER]`

James opened his hand around Durendal’s grip and closed it again.

Cormac watched him do it.

And eighty-two thousand people went as quiet as eighty-two thousand people can go, which is not silence, but which was near enough that James could hear the wind coming over the top of the stand.

---

`[BLOOD WRIT COMMENCING]`

`[10]`

The count came up on both screens and the stadium took it off them immediately, one enormous voice on the outside of the glass.

`[9]`

`[8]`

James let his left hand fall open at his side, palm down, ready.

`[7]`

`[6]`

`[5]`

Cormac dropped his weight.

`[4]`

The reinforced surface under his boots went white.

It went out from him in a thin crust, faster than it should have, spreading across the platform in a widening ring while the count was still running.

`[3]`

`[2]`

`[1]`