Chapter 327 - 318 — Blood on Ice II

Chapter 327: Chapter 318 — Blood on Ice II

He put both palms out, low, and spread his fingers.

The ice on the surface did not thicken.

It went *down*.

James felt it before he understood it — the pressure at the back of his skull, the small steady weight that told him where Fossor was, swerved hard and kept swerving. Under the platform, through every crack Fossor had made and every seam the freeze had opened, ice was going into the ground.

Not at Fossor. Cormac could not see Fossor and did not know where it was.

He was freezing the *spaces*.

James sent it round to the left. Something closed off. He felt it double back and go right, and forty feet away a section of the floor went dead white as Cormac put his weight into it, and the route shut.

The third time, Fossor had to come up.

It broke surface eleven metres from where James wanted it, and Cormac drove a ridge of ice at it before it had fully cleared the ground — a two-metre spike out of the floor at a flat angle, straight into its flank.

Fossor took part of it.

James pulled it away and put it back down before Cormac could turn all his attention onto killing a summon, and the whole exchange had cost him ten seconds and told him something he did not want to know.

Cormac had adapted to it in under a minute.

He had not solved it. He could not solve it; he could not see it and he was spending real output every time he guessed. But the ground had stopped being James’s private country.

---

They came back together and it was harder than the first time, because neither of them was testing anymore.

Cormac built a blade.

It grew off the outside of his right forearm, thirty inches of it, tapered, with the left arm still plated for blocking — and it changed shape when James bound it, which was the thing that nearly cost him an arm.

Steel and ice met eleven times in about nine seconds. The blade chipped. It re-formed while it was still moving. It broke off entirely against Durendal’s edge and there was a new one before Cormac’s arm finished the swing.

On the sixth exchange the edge shifted inside a bind and opened James along the upper arm.

`[JAMES GANNER — HP: 1,778 → 1,718]`

James stopped trying to out-fence a man who could grow a new sword and put his shoulder into him instead.

He drove Cormac back four steps, got Durendal free, and cut across his chest.

Cormac threw a plate of ice up flat against himself at the last quarter-second.

The sword went through the plate and still opened him.

`[CORMAC GANNER — HP: 1,160 → 1,020]`

Blood went across the white in a long arc and sat there, red on white, and did not soak in anywhere.

---

They came apart for a second, both breathing hard.

James’s ribs hurt every time he turned. Cormac’s chest was open and one of his guards was down to the underlayer.

"Did he fight you this hard?"

Cormac said it flatly, not loudly, with his weight already shifting. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ

James did not answer.

He did not look away either, and he did not change his grip, and he did not do a single one of the things a man does when a question has got into him.

Something went across Cormac’s face — not anger exactly. Something colder and more personal than that, the look of a man who has now tried twice.

He came in much harder.

---

James had been fighting with half of what he owned for eleven minutes, and he stopped.

He put his hand out to his right, past the barrier, to where a woman in a charcoal coat had been standing outside the containment field since before the countdown started — not stored, never stored, on her own feet in the open beside the Guild Zero bench where eighty thousand people had been watching her do nothing for a quarter of an hour.

`[REANIMATED — ANATHEMA — SUMMONED]`

The air about six feet from James’s shoulder split open in black.

Alice came through it.

The wings unfolded and kept unfolding, four metres of black going out into a space that had been empty, and the air inside the containment field moved — loose ice fragments scraped backwards across the floor away from her in a wide half-circle.

The sound the stadium made went past what the barrier could do about it.

Cormac’s face tightened for the first time since he had walked out of the tunnel.

He had known she would be here. He had watched her stand outside the glass for fifteen minutes. Knowing a thing and having it appear six feet away with its wings open were not related experiences.

James did not give him a second of it.

"Go."

Alice went.

Cormac threw up a wall — a proper one, five metres of it, thick as a bank vault.

**BOOM.**

The middle of it stopped existing. Ice detonated outward in a flat sheet of glass fragments and half of them went into the containment barrier and made it flare pale.

There was a second wall behind it.

She went through that too.

A third came up, thinner, built in the time it took her to cross four metres — and her fist went through the middle of it without changing speed.

Cormac crossed both forearms in front of his chest a quarter-second before she arrived.

Alice hit him.

He left the ground and travelled. He skipped once off the frozen surface like a stone off water, went over twice, and stopped himself only by driving both hands down and freezing them into the floor as an anchor, forty metres from where he had been standing.

`[CORMAC GANNER — HP: 1,020 → 880]`

*"—that’s it, that has to be—"*

He got up.

Blood was coming out of his nose and out of the corner of his mouth. The right-hand guard was gone entirely, down to the sleeve. His left arm shook when he raised it.

He was standing.

*"...He took three walls and both arms and he is on his feet. I want to be very clear about what everyone just watched — if any part of that had reached him unmitigated, we would be calling the fight."*

---

Alice came again, and Cormac did something different.

He did not build a wall in front of her.

He built one to her right.

Then a second one diagonally, low, under the line one wing needed. Then a third, forty feet ahead and offset, narrowing the space she was flying into.

She could break every one of them and she did.

But she went through the first one on the angle it gave her, and Cormac had already moved for that angle, and by the time she had cleared the second the third one had turned her again.

James understood it about a second before the commentary did.

*He’s not fighting her. He’s steering her.*

Cormac dropped and slid under her line entirely, and while he was still moving, ice came up out of the floor behind James, and then to his left, and then across, and Alice’s next straight-line attack went into a shell of interlocking ice that closed over the top of her.

It was not going to hold.

Everybody in the ground knew that, including Cormac. She hit the inside of it once and a fracture ran across the entire structure from crown to base with a bang like a rifle.

He was already turning away from it.

He had four seconds.

He spent all four on James.