Chapter 238 — What the Bridge Could Carry III (Bonus)

Chapter 238: Chapter 238 — What the Bridge Could Carry III (Bonus)

After that it became a slow, grinding, unglamorous thing.

Maeve did not attempt another large barrier, because she no longer had one in her.

[MAEVE CALLAHAN — MANA: 610 / 2,240]

She built small ones instead, each about the width of three boards, set under the worst of the broken deck and moved forward as the column moved, so that the people crossing the damaged section were walking on light for four or five steps at a time.

It worked, and it cost her the entire time it worked.

Every group that came over that gap took another piece out of her, and there were eight hundred people still to cross. By the second hundred she had stopped making the barriers three boards wide and started making them two. By the fourth she was letting each one fail behind the group that had used it rather than holding it for the group behind, so that there was a constant gap in the middle of the crossing where people had to wait and watch the water through the broken deck until the next piece of light appeared.

[MAEVE CALLAHAN — MANA: 610 → 380 / 2,240]

Cillian left the wall twice to put a water skin in her hands, and both times she drank without taking her eyes off the bridge and gave it back.

By the sixth hundred she had gone from standing to kneeling on the wall walk, one forearm across the parapet, building each barrier off the stone as if she needed something solid to push against. The light she was making had lost its edges. It came up grey-white and grainy instead of clean, and it broke earlier every time, and she started calling the failures out loud so the guards below could hold people back.

"Two more steps and that one’s gone. Stop them. Stop them—"

[MAEVE CALLAHAN — MANA: 380 → 190 / 2,240]

Nobody suggested she stop, and nobody suggested anyone take over, because there was nobody to take over from her. Cillian could kill things and Ronan could hold a line and Finn could break a wagon in half, and not one of the three could put a floor under a child’s foot.

So she knelt on the stone and kept doing it.

Out beyond James’s arc of skeletons, the riders who had failed to hold the bridge mouth came back for the refugees pouring off it, and three of them came in with fresh jars.

Cillian took all three off their mounts across about ninety seconds, waiting each time until the line between his hand and the target had nothing living standing in it.

[GOBLIN RIDER SLAIN — PARTY KILL]

[GOBLIN RIDER SLAIN — PARTY KILL]

[GOBLIN RIDER SLAIN — PARTY KILL]

[EXP GAINED: 480]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 43,935 → 44,415 / 57,000]

A fourth got past his angle entirely and came down the bank at the civilians, and the left-hand skeleton at the bridge mouth took it off the saddle with the hooked spear it had been holding since the first fight and finished it on the ground.

[GOBLIN RIDER — HP: 1,400 → 0]

[GOBLIN RIDER SLAIN — UNDEAD KILL]

[EXP GAINED: 160]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 44,415 → 44,575 / 57,000]

[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED]

[MANA RESTORED: +30]

[MANA: 2,070 → 2,100]

The skeletons worked both ends the whole time. The four with Ronan lifted children and wounded over the abandoned carts jammed against the rails, and the three on James’s side pulled people clear of the broken exit and pushed them out along the bank before the next group came off the timber into them.

[EVACUATION PROGRESS: 61% → 79%]

[BRIDGE INTEGRITY: 44% → 36%]

Two thirds of the way through, a family stopped at an overturned cart and started dragging crates out of it, and the column behind them bunched up within seconds.

James did not argue with them.

He sent a skeleton, and it picked up the smallest of their children and started walking forward with it, and the parents had about one second to decide what mattered.

They left the crates.

Finn and the settlement guards went along the span tipping empty carts through the broken sections or heaving them up against the rails, and Ronan held the centre, standing on the edge of the damage and physically stopping anyone who tried to step onto boards that Maeve was no longer supporting.

[EVACUATION PROGRESS: 79% → 96%]

James stayed at the far mouth the whole time, because out beyond the torchlight the surviving riders had stopped attacking and started circling, and he knew exactly what they were waiting for. The moment the bridge was empty and Team Zero’s attention came off it, there would be two thousand people standing in an open field on this side of the river with nothing between them and the rest of that warband.

---

The last group across was the wounded.

Several defenders came in a slow knot, and behind them two healers carried a man between them with his arms over both their shoulders and his feet dragging.

The centre beam cracked while they were still on it. The sound ran the length of the bridge, and the boards under the healers dropped half an inch and stayed dropped.

Maeve put a barrier under the next board.

It was the size of a doorstep, because a doorstep was what she had left. It held for exactly as long as the man’s weight was on it and broke as his foot came off it, and she made another under the following board, and that one broke too, and she made another.

[MAEVE CALLAHAN — MANA: 190 → 60 / 2,240]

Eight hundred people had crossed on her light in the last twenty minutes and she was down to lifting three men one foot at a time, and the difference between those two numbers was written in her face.

She had both hands on the parapet now, and she was building the barriers off the stone with her forearms shaking, and between each one she put her forehead down against the back of her wrist for half a second before she raised her head and made the next.

Cillian crouched beside her and did not say anything, because there was nothing useful to say and she would not have heard it anyway.

The healers came off the timber onto the bank in front of James. The last civilian, a boy of about sixteen with somebody else’s bag over his shoulder, came off two seconds behind them.

[EVACUATION PROGRESS: 100%]

Maeve let everything go before the failures could drag anything more out of her.

The damaged central support gave way about four seconds later.

It went without drama, folding sideways into the water, and the middle of the bridge came down after it in one long section — the broken deck, the jammed carts, the abandoned wagons, the grain, the tools, the mattresses, a winter’s worth of everything two thousand people owned — and the river took all of it and closed over the top.

What was left was two stumps of timber facing each other across open water.

[BATTLEFIELD EVENT COMPLETED — THE WESTERN EVACUATION]

[CIVILIANS EVACUATED: 100%]

[WESTERN BRIDGE: DESTROYED]

[WESTERN SETTLEMENT: STILL STANDING]

[FLOOR 23 CLEAR CONDITION: NOT YET MET]

---

James stood on the bank with two thousand people behind him and looked across the gap at his team.

Ronan was on the other stump of the bridge with his shield hanging off his arm. Finn beside him. Maeve still down on one knee on the wall walk above, and Cillian crouched next to her with a hand on her back.

One of the four original skeletons stood a pace behind Ronan, perfectly intact, perfectly still.

That was a door. Grave Step would put him back with his team in a second and a half, and it would cost him a hundred and twenty mana and nothing else.

And it would leave two thousand civilians standing in an open field, at night, protected by three damaged skeletons, with mounted goblins riding circles beyond the torchlight waiting for exactly that.

He did not use it.

Ronan’s voice came through the party channel, flat and clear, as fresh horns started sounding somewhere out beyond the settlement’s western wall.

"James. The west field’s moving again."