Chapter 132 - 130 — The Ash Side II

> **[Jace Nolan.]**

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> **[Level 13.]**

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> **[Strength: 35.]**

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> **[Endurance: 45.]**

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> **[Agility: 44.]**

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> **[Perception: 30.]**

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> **[Health: 450/450.]**

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> **[Mana: 270/270.]**

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> **[Unassigned Attribute Points: 14.]**

Fourteen is a great deal. It is also the last fourteen I am going to see for a while, because the next one comes at Level Fourteen and I am a hundred and seventy-five short of that.

I have four problems and I know what all four of them are, which is the entire reason I did not spend these on a bench in a Tower passage nine days ago.

---

The first is that a Warden is going to be on me before I have finished deciding it is coming. Four separate accounts and a woman who watched it happen say the same thing.

I cannot fix that with Perception. Perception tells me sooner. It does not move me, and the gap Hana described is not a gap you think your way out of.

What survives that is not getting hit and being able to take the one that lands.

**Agility, plus six. Forty-four to fifty.**

---

The second is that this is twelve kilometres of city and the route is one to two days, and nothing in my Status has ever been asked to do anything for two consecutive days.

Nine hours on Floor One took me down to thirty-five out of four hundred and fifty.

**Endurance, plus five. Forty-five to fifty.**

> **[Maximum Health: 450 → 500.]**

>

> **[Health: 450/500 → 500/500.]**

Fifty more Health and a body that arrives at hour twenty in a condition I can use.

---

The third is bronze.

Mercer put it in one sentence and I have thought about it every day since. I am not going through that shell.

I am going into the joints, and a joint is a small target on a moving thing, and I will get fewer chances at it than I would like.

So each one has to do more.

**Strength, plus three. Thirty-five to thirty-eight.**

---

And the fourth is Perception, which gets nothing.

Not because it is useless.

Because Theo Marchand reads moving mana through walls at forty metres, and I have six metres of living things, and the party did not recruit him so that I could spend points being a worse version of him.

If I am in the other city from Theo, three more points of Perception is not going to find me a Warden behind a collapsed building. Standing in the right place will.

> **[Strength: 35 → 38.]**

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> **[Endurance: 45 → 50.]**

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> **[Agility: 44 → 50.]**

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> **[Perception: 30.]**

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> **[Unassigned Attribute Points: 0.]**

Nine days waiting to spend those and it took four minutes once I had actually been told what the floor was going to ask me.

---

I got to the facility at eight and the other five had been there since seven.

They had taken over one of the upstairs rooms and there was kit laid out along three tables in six separate lots, and the lots were not sorted by person.

They were sorted by item.

"Because we do not know who is going where," Krüger said, when I came in. "So nothing lives on one person."

---

Hana had a small flat pouch in each hand and was putting one into six different packs.

"You are the healer," I said. "Why is everybody carrying trauma kits?"

"Because on my last attempt I was the healer and I was carrying all of it." She did not stop packing.

"And the Tower put me on the far side of a city from four people who had bandages and no idea which end of them went down."

"So everybody gets one."

"Everybody gets one and everybody is going to show me they can open it with one hand before we leave this room." She looked up. "Including you. Give me yours."

---

She went through my kit in about twenty seconds and took one thing out of it and put it back the other way round.

"Clotting pack goes on top, flat, tab outward. You had it under the line."

"It fits better under the line."

"It fits beautifully under the line and you will be trying to get it out of there with one hand in the dark with a man bleeding on you." She put the flap down. "Everybody does that. Everybody packs by what fits."

"Right."

"That is what I am for before anybody is hurt," she said, and went back down the table.

---

Theo had the route sheets, six copies, and was going through them with a red pencil.

"Two verified accounts say the second bridge on the western approach is down. One says it is standing. All three have a side marked and all three say Ash."

"So one of them is wrong."

"Or all three are right and it goes down at some point during an attempt and they were in there at different times."

He put a mark on all six sheets in the same place. "I am marking it *disputed* rather than *down* because if somebody reads *down* they will plan round it and then find it standing and lose an hour."

That is the most useful thing that man has said since I met him.

---

Sokolov was handing out small things and not explaining them.

A short length of line with a hook on it. Two wedges of hard rubber. A folding pry bar about the length of a forearm.

"What are these for," Theo said.

"Doors."

"You can hold a door."

"Four times, thirty seconds each." Sokolov put a wedge into his hand. "Then I cannot. That does not stop being a door."

---

Mara went round all six of us with a piece of chalk and a doorway.

She made every one of us stand in the frame and then turn, with whatever we were carrying, and she watched our shoulders.

"Marchand, your pack is too high. In a two-metre street with a wall on your right you are going to catch it every time you turn to look behind you."

"It is comfortable up there."

"Drop it four centimetres and be uncomfortable."

He dropped it four centimetres.

When she got to me she took about a second and a half.

"You are the only person here whose weapon is his hands, so you are the only person who has no reach and no profile problem at all. You go first into anything narrow."

"Is that a compliment."

"It is a use."

---

Krüger did not stand over any of it.

He walked the tables twice, and the second time round I worked out what he was doing, because he was not looking at the kit.

He was standing in the middle of the room and looking at three of us at a time.

He did it with me, Hana and Sokolov. Then with Hana, Mara and Theo. Then with himself, me and Marchand. Then four or five more.

"What are you doing," I said.

"Counting." He did not look away from the tables. "Twenty ways to split six into two threes. I want to know whether there is one that does not work."

"And?"

"One of them is bad, but it is not fatal."

"Which one?"

"The split that puts Marchand, Sokolov, and Arai together. That is a great deal of information and not enough to hit anybody with. It also leaves you, me, and Viteri on the other side, which is three people who all want to be at the front."

---

Then he put his hand up and everybody stopped.

"Pillar order. Once, and then we are done talking."

Six voices, not quite together.

"Threat. Location. Route. Injuries. Objective."

"Marchand."

"Threat, location, route, injuries, objective."

"And what is not in that list."

Theo took a breath. "Everything I can see that is not one of those five."

"Good. Say it back to yourself when the silver comes up, before you say anything to us."