Chapter 149 - 147 — The Two Sides of Victory I

**POV: Jace**

---

The first one came down forty metres of ramp and arrived at our wall.

It did not slow for it. It came at the gap on the left, against the chamber wall, one metre and ten centimetres of it, and it turned its shoulders on the way in without being told to.

That is the part I had not allowed for. It did not have to work out what the gap was. It saw a hole and it put itself through the hole at full speed.

---

I was six metres inside and I had my feet flat before it came through.

> **[Ability Activated: Antaeus.]**

> **[Mana: 188/280 → 176/280.]**

The floor of that chamber is dressed stone laid on dressed stone with two hundred metres of tower sitting on top of it.

It is the best ground I have ever stood on.

---

It came out of the gap already committed and I did not have to guess where.

That is the whole value of what we built. There is one line into this room and it has to be on it.

I took the hook on crossed forearms and did not move.

The plates held and the shock went down through my hips into the floor and the floor took it, and two hundred and forty grams a side of adamantine sent the rest of it into my arms, where it is going to stay.

> **[Health: 227/510 → 199/510.]**

---

> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**

> **[Mana: 176/280 → 170/280.]**

Three seconds into the bronze under the left arm while it was still trying to get its shoulder out of a doorway.

The arm came down four inches and stopped coming up.

Then I let Antaeus go, because the second one was already at the gap and the whole point of a doorway is that you are not obliged to stand in front of it.

---

I got round the outside of the first one while it was turning and put the right hand into the collar seam twice.

> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**

> **[Mana: 170/280 → 164/280.]**

> **[Warden eliminated.]**

>

> **[Experience acquired: 90.]**

>

> **[EXP: 455/1,400 → 545/1,400.]**

It came down across the mouth of the gap, which was the best thing it did all evening, because for about eleven seconds the second one had to get past its own.

---

"Anton."

"I have five."

"Then do not spend one on that."

"I was not going to."

He was eight metres inside, sitting against the base of a fallen bronze frame with his legs out in front of him, which is what a man does when standing up costs him something.

Hana was twenty metres back on the far side of the disc and had not moved and was not going to unless somebody made her.

---

The second one came over its own dead and it came differently.

It did not come through at speed. It put the polearm through first, horizontally, and worked the shaft against the block on the left, and I understood what it was doing about a second after it started.

It was not trying to get in.

It was trying to make the hole bigger.

---

"It is levering the block," Sokolov said.

"I can see that."

"The block will go. It is stone sitting on stone and that is the whole of why it does not need me."

"How long."

"Eleven seconds. Twelve."

---

I went at it inside the eleven.

> **[Ability Activated: Snare.]**

> **[Mana: 164/280 → 154/280.]**

Rear foot, on the ramp side of the gap, which is the one it had all its weight on for the lever.

It did not fall over. It changed its grip and kept levering off a foot it could not lift, which is a thing I have now watched three of them do and which I am never going to find less unpleasant.

---

But it had to stop pulling to do it.

> **[Talaria activated.]**

> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**

> **[Mana: 154/280 → 146/280.]**

Six metres, which in that chamber is about as far as I can go before the arrest has nowhere to spread.

It came up through the ankle and the hip and I felt something in the hip say something it has not said before.

Four seconds under the arm, into the same place I have been going all day, and then the collar.

> **[Warden eliminated.]**

>

> **[Experience acquired: 90.]**

>

> **[EXP: 545/1,400 → 635/1,400.]**

---

The block went anyway.

Not from the lever. From the second one coming down on top of it, which is an argument I did not have a way to win.

The gap went from one metre ten to about one metre eighty, and there is a difference between those two numbers and the difference is not seventy centimetres.

It is that one metre ten is a man’s shoulders and one metre eighty is a Warden’s.

---

The third one came through it without turning anything at all.

It got about three metres into the chamber, which is three metres further than either of the others managed, and the first thing I knew about the size of that problem was the hook coming at me from an angle that the wall had been covering.

I got out of most of it.

> **[Health: 199/510 → 166/510.]**

---

I want to put down what I was thinking at that point, because it was about four words long and it did not change for the rest of the night.

*This is not the objective.*

I could kill that one. I have killed three today and two of them this evening. Every single one of them costs me between thirty and fifty Health and between ten and twenty Mana and I do not have five more of either.

And when they are all dead the floor is not cleared, because clearing it is a disc and a pillar and three people in a city I cannot see.

---

I put it on the ground at the cost of the worst exchange of the day.

It got a hand on the front of what is left of my armour, the way the first one in that market street did, and I broke the grip by going backward out of the armour rather than out of the hand.

Which means I am now wearing about half a torso piece and a strap.

> **[Health: 166/510 → 131/510.]**

> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**

> **[Mana: 146/280 → 140/280.]**

> **[Warden eliminated.]**

>

> **[Experience acquired: 90.]**

>

> **[EXP: 635/1,400 → 725/1,400.]**

---

Then there was about ninety seconds of nothing, which was worse than the fighting.

I stood in the middle of a room with three dead things in the mouth of it and listened to the ramp.

Something came down it. Stopped. Went back up.

"They are going to keep coming," Hana said.

"Yes."

"For how long."

"Until there are no more of them on that plaza."

---

"Anton. Numbers."

"Four."

"An hour ago you said six."

"An hour ago I had not spent two." He had his head back against the frame. "I will get one back in about twenty minutes. That is what I have got."

"Hana."

"Two closings and neither of them is going into you tonight unless you are on the floor." She said it without any apology in it. "And I want to say the thing nobody has said."

"Go on."

"We cannot hold this."