Chapter 326 - 317 — Blood on Ice I

Chapter 326: Chapter 317 — Blood on Ice I

`[1]`

James’s weight came forward onto the balls of his feet.

Forty metres away, Cormac dropped his centre and the frost under his boots thickened with a dry cracking sound, like a windscreen going in slow motion.

`[BLOOD WRIT COMMENCED]`

Cormac moved first.

He did not throw anything.

He drove his right hand into the reinforced floor.

**CRACK.**

Ice went out of his palm in a white shockwave, and the temperature in that arena dropped so hard and so fast that James’s next breath came out of him in a cloud.

Frost tore along the seams of the combat platform in branching lines, faster than a man could run, and where two lines met the whole surface between them went white and kept going. Twelve seconds after the count hit zero there was no reinforced grey floor left anywhere on the platform.

There was a frozen lake, sixty metres across, and two men standing on it.

Beyond the glass, eighty-two thousand people made a sound that reached James as a flat wall of pressure with nothing in it he could pick out.

`[CORMAC GANNER]`

`[LEVEL: 39]`

`[HP: 1,760 / 1,760]`

James’s right boot slid.

It was not much. His foot went four or five inches further than he had told it to go, and his hip came round to follow it, and a week ago that would have been most of his balance.

He caught it.

Nine points of Agility, allocated in a training hall on a Monday morning by a man who had spent six months meaning to put them into Intelligence.

Cormac was already on him.

---

He came across the ice like a man on a track.

That was the first genuinely bad thing about it, and James understood the whole shape of the fight in the two seconds it took Cormac to cover thirty metres — every step Cormac took was on ground that had been *his* since the first second, and every step James took was on ground he had to think about.

Ice climbed Cormac’s forearms as he ran.

James had seen the old footage of that a hundred times: a thick clumsy fist of frozen water, crude, the sort of thing a security officer had taken off him in a function room without much trouble.

It was not that anymore.

It grew from the knuckles to just below the elbow in layered plates, thicker across the striking faces, thinned and jointed at the wrist and the crook of the arm so nothing locked up. There was a ridge along the outside edge of each one.

Two years. He had done nothing but work on it.

The first punch came at James’s head.

James got Durendal across.

**CLANG — CRACK.**

Steel took a section of the guard off in a spinning white chunk that skittered forty feet across the ice.

And Cormac did not step back.

His other hand came in under the sword before James could bring it back, and the second guard went into James’s ribs.

James folded around it.

The cold arrived a fraction before the pain — a shocking, sinking, wrong kind of cold that went straight through the armour and made every muscle down that side seize at once.

`[JAMES GANNER — HP: 2,048 → 1,868]`

Croke Park came apart.

The roar rolled around the bowl and came down on the containment field from every side, and through it, faintly, the commentary carried on the arena feed:

*"—clean. He’s caught him clean, and that is not a man here to survive twelve minutes—"*

James got two steps of distance.

Cormac took one and a half of them back.

---

James went low, because Cormac’s guard was high.

The sweep came at his ankles. James hopped it — and an ice ridge snapped up out of the floor exactly where his lead foot was going to land.

He twisted in the air.

It was ugly. It was not anything anybody would put in a training video. His trailing leg came round and his shoulder dropped and he landed on the outside edge of one boot with his weight in entirely the wrong place, and he kept his feet.

Cormac was already set for the landing.

James did not retreat into it.

He went forward instead — inside the striking arc, close enough that a punch had no room to build, and put Durendal across.

Cormac blocked with the forearm.

The blade went through the outer plate, through the second layer, and bit into what was underneath.

`[CORMAC GANNER — HP: 1,760 → 1,670]`

Blood came out over the white.

And Cormac’s face changed.

Not fear. James had seen fear a great many times and this was not it. It was the look of a man who had brought a plan with him and had just found the first line in it that needed amending.

James gave him no time to amend anything.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 3,040 / 3,100]`

He fired it from four feet.

Cormac threw both arms up and ice came out of the floor between them in a slab.

The grey discharge went into it and ate it. The slab went to nothing across a metre-wide circle and a second one formed behind it and cracked from the centre outward, and what came through the other side of that hit Cormac in the chest and took him off his feet.

He went across his own ice on his back for eleven metres and came up spinning fragments in a wide arc that skittered and rang all the way to the containment barrier.

`[CORMAC GANNER — HP: 1,670 → 1,410]`

---

James went after him.

Cormac slammed his boot sideways into the ground while he was still getting up and a wall came out of the floor — three metres high, a metre thick, straight across James’s line.

James did not go round it.

He put Durendal into it two-handed and tore a split most of the way down.

And Cormac’s fist came through the wall from the other side.

The ice fractured outward around his arm in a white flower. James got his shoulder off the line by about four inches and the knuckle-plate scraped up the front of his pauldron with a noise that went through his back teeth instead of taking his jaw off.

James kicked the wall.

The whole damaged section came apart, and the kick carried through it into Cormac’s stomach, and Cormac gave ground for the first time.

---

That was how the first phase went, and it went on longer than anybody in that stadium had planned for.

Cormac did not stand at range and throw things. He fought like a duelist who happened to be able to build the room he was fighting in — guards on his arms, ridges snapping up under James’s feet, short spikes that made a step somewhere else, walls that appeared for a second and a half and then were not needed anymore.

He never made anything bigger than he had to.

James fought with a sword, and with a body that had been rebuilt in a hall for a week, and with a Necro Blast when there was a gap, and did not summon anything at all.

There were no corpses on that platform. That was the whole of it. On a floor he would have had a board up in ninety seconds; here there was ice, and one man, and nothing to raise.

Six minutes in, both of them were bleeding.

*"He’s losing more,"* one of the commentators said, over the top of the other one. *"Look at the numbers, he is losing considerably more — but he is making Ganner pay for every single point of it, and nobody in this stadium expected that."*

---

James opened his left hand at his side.

`[UNEARTH ACTIVATED]`

The frozen floor beneath him shuddered.

The sound came first — a deep grinding underneath the ice, and then the whole white surface for eight metres around James went *pop, pop, pop* as the frost above it lost its bed.

Fossor came up through it.

Reinforced flooring and half a tonne of broken ice went into the air with it, and the crowd noise changed pitch, because they had all watched it come out of the ground on Floor 31 four nights ago.

Cormac turned toward it.

Fossor was already gone.

The hole it left closed about two-thirds of the way and stayed like that, a ragged dark socket in the middle of a white plain.

James felt the pressure at the back of his skull slide away underneath and start to circle.

Cormac looked down at the floor.

James attacked.

That was the entire point and it was the thing James had spent a week learning off Alice and Fossor from the wrong side of it: the summon underground was not there to win a fight on its own. It was there to make a man think about two places at once.

Durendal came in high. Cormac blocked it.

James turned the blade and rolled it down. Cormac caught his sword arm against the flat of a guard and they locked, chest to chest, eight inches apart, with Cormac’s breath going white past James’s ear.

The ground under Cormac exploded.

He got most of himself off it. He was fast enough for that, and he went up and sideways — but Fossor came out at an angle and took his trailing leg, and it threw him.

James had already let the bind go.

He met Cormac where he came down and put Durendal across his side, edge first, through the armour and into him.

`[CORMAC GANNER — HP: 1,410 → 1,160]`

Cormac hit the ice and rolled through his own blood.

The stadium came up off its seats.

---

James followed.

Cormac threw a palm at the floor and ice went up between them in a jagged half-formed structure, and James put the sword through it — and by the time he was through, Cormac was not on the other side of it.

The scrape of a boot on ice came from behind him.

James turned into an elbow.

The plate on Cormac’s forearm went into James’s shoulder joint hard enough to numb the whole arm to the fingers.

`[JAMES GANNER — HP: 1,868 → 1,778]`

`[GRAVE STEP — 120 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,920 / 3,100]`

The battlefield folded, and James came out fourteen metres away on top of the place where Fossor was sitting underneath the ice.

The lurch hit him.

But this time nobody was waiting for it.

Cillian had spent six days making James pay for that half-second every single time, without exception, until James stopped choosing obvious destinations — and here, in a real fight, there was nobody in the world who knew where he was going to be. Cormac had to find him first.

James got the moment he needed and came out of it with the sword up.

Then he saw that Cormac was not looking for him at all.

Cormac was looking at the floor.