Chapter 261 — The Road to Baldwin III (Bonus)

Chapter 261: Chapter 261 — The Road to Baldwin III (Bonus)

Ronan was on his knees six meters away with one hand on his shield, still getting it back onto his arm.

Finn was on the far side of the axe’s arc and could not cross it in time without losing a leg.

James had no anchor anywhere near her that would not put him directly in the path.

Cillian went.

He did not decide to. He was moving before the thought finished, and he put himself between an Orc War-Chief and Maeve knowing perfectly well that he could not take that hit, could not survive that hit, and had nothing left that was cheap enough to fix the situation.

So he used the expensive thing.

[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]

[CILLIAN — MANA STRAIN CRITICAL]

It went into the same shoulder they had been dismantling all afternoon, and this time the joint gave.

[KARGAN — HP: 12,700 → 8,600]

The charge came apart under him. The arm on that side dropped and stayed dropped, and the axe went from a two-handed weapon to a one-handed one in the middle of a run, and Kargan went past Maeve rather than through her and had to catch himself on the ruined knee.

Cillian’s casting arm went dead from the shoulder down.

He stood there with it hanging and did not fall over, and said, to nobody in particular, "That’s me finished."

---

They took the Orc Chief apart from there, and it was not a spectacle.

Ronan could not get the shield back on, because there was nothing left to get it on with.

So he stopped wearing it and started carrying it. He hooked his good arm through the broken strap mounting, tucked the rim in against his ribs and shoulder, and used his own bodyweight where his arm used to do the work — and he stopped attacking Kargan altogether, because he had nothing left to attack anything with.

He went after the axe instead. He put the shield across the haft and leaned on it, jamming the shaft, fouling the backswings, turning a one-handed weapon into a thing that had to fight the ground for every arc.

It was not fighting. It was standing in the way with sixteen kilos of metal and refusing to be moved, which was the only thing he had left and had always been the thing he was best at anyway.

Finn stayed on the leg and would not leave it, cutting the same joint over and over every time the Orc Chief’s weight came onto it.

James raised what he could and used them entirely to force turns, sending skeletons at the ruined shoulder side so Kargan had to rotate a torso that no longer wanted to rotate, and every rotation cost him the good leg’s balance.

Maeve called it. That was all she had left and it was enough.

It took them minutes rather than moments, and it was the least glorious thing any of them had done all day — three exhausted people taking apart something enormous a piece at a time, while it swung at them and could not reach them and would not stop.

[KARGAN — HP: 8,600 → 4,900]

"Now — his weight’s all on the left, *now*—"

And Kargan, who could have gone backward, who had every reason to go backward, chose not to.

[BLOOD-AXE CHARGE ACTIVATED]

He drove off the ruined knee because pride would not let him do anything else, and the knee failed halfway through the acceleration.

Ronan did not try to stop it. He put the shield across the line and leaned, and turned it, and the Orc Chief’s own momentum took him past everyone and into the ground.

Finn was on the leg before he landed and destroyed what was left of it.

[KARGAN — HP: 4,900 → 2,300]

Kargan went down onto both knees in the mud, and kept swinging.

He swung at everything, one-armed, roaring, from the ground, and he was still fast enough that James could not simply walk in — the first attempt got him a sweep at ankle height that would have taken both feet off, and he had to jump the shift instead.

[GRAVE STEP ACTIVATED]

He came out of it on the ruined side, in the opening Finn and Ronan had spent ten minutes building, at contact range with the wound they had all been feeding since the fight began.

Durendal went in first, two-handed, through the gap where the shoulder plate had been burned away and the joint had already failed.

[KARGAN — HP: 2,300 → 900]

The Orc Chief’s remaining arm came round at him and had nothing behind it.

Then James put his palm flat against the open wound and let go of everything he was holding, at a range where no part of it could miss.

[NECRO BLAST ACTIVATED]

[KARGAN — HP: 900 → 0]

[ORC WAR-CHIEF KARGAN SLAIN]

[PARTY EXP GAINED: 6,500]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 49,815 → 56,315 / 63,000]

The Orc Chief came down face-first and the ground took the sound of it, and nobody on Team Zero moved for a moment.

Nobody cheered, either.

Ronan tried to lift the shield and got it to his hip before he stopped and left it there. Cillian’s arm hung. Finn was breathing through his mouth with one hand pressed against his side and blood between the fingers. Maeve was upright, which was all that could be said for her.

And James, still half in the wrong world from the shift, was already turning to look south before his balance came back, because that was the only direction that mattered now.

---

Sixty meters away, Raymond was walking toward them through the mud with Morcant’s blood on his sword.

For the first time since they had appeared, there was nothing standing in the road.

Then the Crown soldiers ahead began to move.

They did not run. They did not charge. The formation blocking the southern approach simply opened, men stepping backward and sideways in no particular hurry, making a space down the middle of themselves.

Making room.

James heard the hooves before he saw anything, under the noise of the battle, getting closer.

Baldwin came through the gap his own army had made for him.

The horse’s legs were red to the knee. His sword was already in his hand and had been for some time. Six Royal Guards came through behind him and stopped where he stopped, and the whole thing was so quiet, so completely without ceremony, that it was worse than any charge would have been.

Raymond stopped walking.

James watched his hand change on his sword — not tighten, exactly. Resettle. Everything else on that battlefield went out of him at once, the corridor, the Legion, the corpse of the man he had just killed, all of it, and there was nothing left in his face except the rider forty meters in front of him.

Baldwin looked at Morcant’s body first, and something moved behind his eyes and was put away.

Then Kargan’s.

Then the five foreigners standing over it.

Then his brother.

James pulled the Inspect this time, and this time it took.

[INSPECT SUCCESSFUL]

[PRINCE BALDWIN]

[LEVEL: 60]

[CLASS: CROWN WARLORD]

[HP: 52,000 / 52,000]

[TITLE: LAWFUL HEIR OF CAERLEON]

James’s hand closed on Durendal’s grip until the leather creaked.

Raymond had just killed Morcant. Wounded in two places, out of a saddle, on foot, against a Lord Commander eight levels above the man who had nearly ended James on the last floor — and Raymond had taken him apart.

Baldwin stood ten levels above Raymond.

He had crossed half a battlefield to get here, through his own collapsing line, through Northern soldiers and an ogre, and he had arrived with a full bar and his breathing unchanged, and every single thing James had watched him do had been done with the minimum amount of movement required.

The broadcast, which had spent five minutes roaring about Raymond, went very quiet and then went somewhere else entirely.

Baldwin brought the horse to a stop opposite his brother.

Then he walked the horse forward another twenty meters, unhurried, until there was nothing between the two of them but churned ground and other men’s dead.

He swung down out of the saddle and handed the reins to the guard nearest him, and the guard took them and backed the animal away, and none of the six followed him forward.

The battle went on around all of it. Somewhere east, men were still dying by the hundred.

Raymond raised his sword.

Baldwin raised his own.

And James, standing over a dead War-Chief with three of his team barely functional and the man he had come here to kill twenty meters away, found that the last thing between him and the mission was Baldwin’s younger brother.