Chapter 254 — The Field Where Kingdoms Die II

Chapter 254: Chapter 254 — The Field Where Kingdoms Die II

James waited half a heartbeat for the rest of it.

No timer came. No secondary objective. No survival condition, no map, no enemy manifest.

"That’s it?" Cillian said.

"Apparently that’s it."

Which was worse. Every floor since twenty-one had eventually told them what else it wanted. This one had looked at a field with three armies on it and decided the target was the only instruction they needed.

**[GalwayGoblin]:** WHAT THE FUCK

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** THATS AN ARMY

**[CorkClimber]:** TWO ARMIES

**[user88317]:** THREE IF YOU COUNT THE ORCS

**[ZeroFan]:** THOSE GREY BANNERS ON THE EAST

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** VANE’S MEN

**[RaymondWasRight]:** SIX THOUSAND. THEY ACTUALLY MADE IT HERE

**[AshesAndBones]:** floor 24 mattered holy shit

---

Raymond came down the line on horseback with four officers and a handful of guards, and he was a different man from the one who had stood over a map table at Dunadd.

His armour had been repaired at least twice, badly, in the field. There was old blood dried black into the joints of it that nobody had found time to clean. His cloak was the colour of the ground. There were fewer men riding with him than there had been at the crossroads camp, and none of them looked like ceremonial guards anymore.

He pulled up in front of them and did not waste a word on how long it had been.

"Did it finally tell you what it wants?"

"Baldwin," James said.

Raymond took that without any visible reaction, which told James he had been half expecting it for a month.

He turned in the saddle and pointed south, past the shield lines, past the second Crown formation, toward a cluster of standards at the centre-rear of the army where the road ran back toward Caerleon.

"Then that’s your problem. He’s behind the household companies, on the Caerleon road, and every man on this field is between you and him." He looked back down. "You’ll not get there around. There’s no around."

"Then we go through."

"Through six thousand of my brother’s soldiers and whatever the pass sent down on top of us." Raymond’s mouth did something that was not a smile. "You’ve a talent for simple answers."

Then Baldwin’s horns went.

---

The volley came first.

The sky over the southern line went briefly and horribly dark, and every officer within a hundred meters of James started screaming the same word.

"SHIELDS — SHIELDS UP—"

The Northern Legion closed shoulder to shoulder and got their shields over their heads, and the arrows came down on a formation that had done it a hundred times and still lost men doing it.

The sound was not like rain. It was a thousand separate hard knocks arriving at once, wood and iron and helmets, and underneath that the wet ones.

The soldier standing three feet from James was half a second late getting his shield up. An arrow went in under his cheekbone and out through the side of his jaw and he went straight down against the knees of the man behind him, who could not stop to help him because stopping meant a gap.

Another arrow hit Ronan’s shield hard enough to bury itself two inches into the new face and stood there quivering.

Ronan did not look at it.

Maeve did not try to cover the army, because she could not cover the army. She found the place where a company had lost three men in the same three seconds and put her light over that fifteen-meter stretch, and the next arrows into that space came off her barrier instead of into the gap.

Then the Crown mages fired.

They came in behind the arrows and low, and where they hit, sections of the Northern shield wall simply came apart — men thrown sideways, shields blown out of hands, three or four holes opened along the line in the space of a breath.

Which was the entire point of them, and Baldwin’s infantry had been waiting for exactly that.

The Crown line came forward.

"FORWARD!" Raymond was already shouting, standing in his stirrups. "MEET THEM, DON’T LET THEM PICK THE GROUND — FORWARD!"

Both armies moved, and the field closed, and then the middle of the world was a sound James felt in his teeth.

---

He saw the first contact from ten meters away and understood in that second what fighting through this was actually going to mean.

Crown shields hit Northern shields hard enough to throw men off their feet in the second rank. Spears went in through the hand-width gaps between rims, blind, and came out with things on them.

A Northern soldier hooked the top of a Crown shield with his blade and hauled it down, and the man beside him drove a spear into the throat that appeared above it. A Crown axeman caught that soldier’s wrist as he pulled back and split his forearm to the bone before Ronan came past both of them and put his shield into the axeman’s chest hard enough to send him backward into his own second rank.

There were thousands of men doing that. In both directions. For as far as James could see.

"We can’t fight this," he said.

Raymond wheeled his horse. "You’ve noticed."

"No — we can’t fight *this*." James pointed south, at the standards. "We don’t need to beat your brother’s army. We need a corridor. Narrow, straight, through to those banners, and we need it before that pass host reaches our backs."

Raymond looked at the ground between them and the Crown centre for about two seconds.

Then he stood in his stirrups and started shouting names.

The companies that came were not the ones nearest. They were the ones his officers went and fetched — the veterans, the ones with intact shields, the ones who had held at Dunadd — and they formed up behind Team Zero rather than in front of them.

"Point of the spear is yours," Raymond said. "We widen whatever you open. If you stop, we all stop, and then we die out here in a shape my brother chose."

---

They took the formation they had drilled.

Ronan at the front with the new shield. Finn half a pace back and to the right where he could strike past him without fouling him. James and Maeve behind that, and Cillian out wide on the left with enough lateral room to put lightning somewhere that was not through Raymond’s own soldiers.

The first Crown block was shields and spears, four deep, and there was not a single corpse on the ground that belonged to James.

So he did it the hard way.

Ronan hit the centre of the block and took the spear thrust that came over the top of it on the boss. Finn came round his right shoulder and buried an axe into the rim of the shield beside it and tore the whole thing outward, and the man holding it went with it.

A spearman in the second rank lunged through the gap that opened.

James knocked the shaft aside with Durendal and put his hand through the space behind it.

[NECRO BLAST ACTIVATED]

[MANA COST: 60]

The spearman folded backward into his own line.

There it was. One body, inside their formation, four meters from where James was standing.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON ACTIVATED]

[MANA COST: 80]

He did not raise it beside himself, and he did not raise it in front of the shield wall.

He raised it where it had fallen, which was behind the front rank, inside the block, in the middle of a formation whose entire design assumed that everything dangerous was on the outside of it.

The dead spearman got up between men who had been standing beside him ten seconds earlier and drove his own weapon into the back of the shieldman ahead of him.

The front rank turned.

Not all of it. Six men, maybe eight, for about half a second, because something was killing them from a direction their shields did not face.

Ronan went through them like a door.

Finn came behind him widening it, and behind Finn came four hundred Northern Legion veterans who had been waiting all morning for somebody to make a hole.

**[GraveEnjoyerIE]:** HE RAISED HIM IN THEIR OWN LINE

**[CorkClimber]:** THAT IS DISGUSTING

**[ZeroFan]:** DO IT AGAIN

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** ronans already through

**[MaeveCallMe]:** MAEVE LEFT

**[user88317]:** SHE KNOWS BRO

They broke that block in under two minutes.

Behind it there was another one, and behind that a third, and the Crown standards did not look any closer at all.

---

The cavalry did not come at Ronan.

They came at the side, which was the correct decision, because a spearhead moving forward has a flank by definition and Baldwin’s riders had been watching this one form for five minutes.

Maeve saw the angle before anyone else did.

"RIGHT — right flank, forty riders, they’re coming in behind our shoulder—"

Ronan could not turn. Turning the head of the spear meant stopping the spear, and stopping meant every Crown formation they had just broken had time to close behind them.

So Cillian turned instead.

He held it while the leading horses committed, because a cavalry charge that has committed cannot un-commit, and he held it a second longer while a knot of Raymond’s men cleared out of his line.

[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]

The bolt took the first two riders and the animals under them.

It did not stop a cavalry charge, because nothing one man does stops a cavalry charge. What it did was put two horses down on the ground in front of forty more at full gallop.

The third animal went into the first two and came apart. The riders behind had to split left and right around a wall of thrashing horseflesh, and what arrived at the flank of the spearhead was not a charge anymore, it was a stream of individual riders coming through a gap at uneven speeds.

Raymond’s veterans killed them from underneath as they came — spears up into horses, hooks into legs, men pulled out of saddles and finished on the ground.

One got through clean.

He came in behind Cillian while Cillian was still discharging, and his sword caught him across the top of the shoulder and opened him from the collarbone outward.

Finn turned and put an axe into the rider’s side hard enough to lift him out of the saddle, and the horse ran on without him.

"Cillian—"

"Working." He had one hand clamped over it and the conductors on that arm were still live. "It’s shallow. Maeve, do not spend anything on this, I can still—"

"I wasn’t going to," Maeve said, already looking somewhere else.

---

After that, the field started paying James back.

There were bodies everywhere now, Crown and Northern both, and he took what he could hold.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON x3]

[MANA COST: 240]

Grave Command pushed them apart the moment they stood — one wide left into the Crown formation’s shoulder, one deep in front of Ronan, one out right where the cavalry had come from — because clustering them around himself was how a necromancer got a lot of bone destroyed by one competent officer with a plan.

They killed. When they killed close enough, the cold came back up his arm.

[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED]

[MANA RESTORED: +30]

It was not a lot. It was not nothing, either, and it kept happening, and somewhere in the third formation James noticed that his mana had stopped being a countdown and had started being a budget.

He kept raising until the interface stopped letting him.

[SUMMON LIMIT REACHED]

Which was fine, because the ones he could not raise were still useful.

Every dead man on that field was a place he could be standing.

He began seeding them deliberately — putting his skeletons out at staggered distances rather than in a line, ten meters apart and thirty and fifty, on both sides of the corridor, so that no single volley and no single competent officer could erase every destination he owned at once.

Then he got the chance to prove he had learned something.

A Crown captain was holding the second rank of the next block together, and there was a corpse lying four meters behind him, perfectly placed, absolutely ideal.

The captain glanced at it while he was shouting.

James watched him do it and did not take it.

He took the worse one instead — a body slumped against the wheel of a broken supply wagon eleven meters further out, at a bad angle, with no clear line to anything.

[GRAVE STEP ACTIVATED]

[MANA COST: 120]

He arrived with the world sliding sideways the way it always did, and for that whole second he was blind and off balance and completely unable to defend himself.

And the wagon was between him and everything that wanted to kill him.

When the field came back, James came around the wreck at a walk and put Durendal through the captain’s side under the arm where the plate ended.

---

The monsters reached them somewhere in the fourth formation.

A goblin pack came through Baldwin’s eastern flank, killed a wounded Crown soldier who had been crawling toward his own lines, and then turned and came at the Northern Legion instead, because there was no side of this they were on.

Further ahead, an ogre walked into the Crown block Team Zero was about to hit and started taking it apart. Three men went into the air off one swing.

"Road’s opening," Cillian said, and started forward.

Finn caught his collar.

"Wait."

The ogre finished the Crown soldiers and immediately reached down, picked up a Northern Legion man who had run into the gap, and broke him against the ground.

Cillian stopped moving.

"Right," he said. "Not a friend."

"Nothing out here is," Raymond said, riding past. He turned in the saddle and shouted down the line: "LEAVE THE MONSTERS WHERE THEY’RE KILLING CROWN MEN. Only engage what stands in the corridor. We do not have soldiers to spend being *heroic*."

They went through the hole the ogre had made without thanking it and without fighting it.