Chapter 262 — The Stronger Brother I

Chapter 262: Chapter 262 — The Stronger Brother I

Baldwin looked at Morcant’s body for perhaps two seconds.

Something crossed his face while he did it and was gone before it finished forming, filed away somewhere for a day that was not this one. Then he looked back at his brother, and did not look at the corpse again.

Raymond had stopped bleeding from the shoulder mostly because there was not much left to come out of it. His side was open under the plate where Morcant’s second cut had gone through, his sword was still red to the crossguard, and he was breathing like a man who had been fighting for an hour, which he had.

None of that was in his face. His jaw had locked, his grip had resettled, and he had stopped looking at anything on that field that was not his brother.

They spoke, briefly, and James caught most of it between guards.

Baldwin said something about how this had always been going to end in a field, and that Raymond had chosen which field. Raymond told him the crown had stopped being the point somewhere north of the pass, and that he was not here for a throne.

Baldwin asked what he was here for, then.

Raymond told him.

It was four words long and it was not about kingship, and whatever it was, it landed — because Baldwin’s expression finally changed for the first time since he had ridden through his own line.

Then the Royal Guard came.

Six of them, in a single movement, closing around Team Zero rather than at them — not trying to kill five Challengers so much as put six armoured bodies between the Challengers and their prince.

"They’re not going for us," Ronan said, hauling the shield in against his ribs with his good arm. "They’re going for the *space*."

"Then we take it off them," James said.

---

Raymond moved first, and he did not open with anything clever.

He closed the distance and cut at Baldwin’s sword arm — the same economical, unbeautiful battlefield work that had taken Morcant apart, aimed at the part of a man that made him a threat rather than the part that made him dramatic.

Baldwin did not give ground for it. He turned the strike aside on his own blade, close in, and Raymond was already changing levels while the steel was still ringing, dropping his line and coming across the ribs.

Baldwin took his first step backward.

Raymond went after it, because he knew exactly what happened if Baldwin got room, and got inside his brother’s weapon line before he could reset.

The edge went across Baldwin’s side under the arm.

[PRINCE BALDWIN]

[HP: 52,000 → 49,200]

James saw the number move while he was putting Durendal into a guard’s shield, and something in his chest went very slightly loose.

Baldwin bled. There was blood on the man’s surcoat, running, real.

**[RaymondWasRight]:** HE CUT HIM

**[GalwayGoblin]:** RAYMOND ACTUALLY HURT BALDWIN

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** good. now look at how baldwin reacted.

Baldwin did not react at all.

He did not stagger back, or shout, or come forward in a rage. His face did the same thing it had done over Morcant’s body — registered, filed, closed. His weight settled slightly differently.

And he stopped giving Raymond room.

On the next attack, Raymond cut and Baldwin met it — and then did not separate. He let the blades bind, let his brother’s steel cross his own and stay there, which is the one place a man with Raymond’s speed did not want the fight to go.

Then he turned the bind.

Raymond’s sword went outward and away, and Baldwin stepped inside the length of both weapons and hit him in the face with the hilt.

Raymond’s head snapped sideways. He stumbled and did not fall.

Baldwin followed with a short thrust to the body — no swing, no distance, just a straight economical push of the point — and Raymond twisted enough that it grated across his breastplate instead of going through it, then put his shoulder into his brother’s chest and knocked them apart by force.

They came off each other and reset, and both of them were breathing now.

---

The Royal Guard were nothing like the soldiers Team Zero had been cutting through all afternoon.

They were heavy, they were disciplined, and they had one objective. They did not chase. They did not overcommit. When Cillian put a burst into one, the man took it on his shield and stayed exactly where he was standing, because standing exactly there was the entire job.

Ronan took the first two.

He had the shield hooked through its broken mounting on his good arm with the rim jammed in against his ribs, and he met them the only way that carry allowed — with his whole body behind it, turning at the hips, using himself as the frame the shield no longer had.

It worked for about fifteen seconds. Then it started slipping, because a man cannot hold sixteen kilos of steel against his own side indefinitely with one arm and no straps, and both guards could see it sagging between exchanges.

The third one noticed and went low and outside, at the ruined arm hanging useless on the other side, where there was no shield and never would be again.

Ronan turned his whole trunk to bring the carried shield across and got about two-thirds of it there.

Maeve’s light hit him before the rest of it landed.

Which meant it came off Finn, who was mid-exchange and suddenly had nothing over him at all — and Finn felt it go, and did not complain, and used the two seconds Ronan’s block had bought instead.

He came around the outside and killed the first guard.

[LINEBREAKER — A]

[BREAKER STACKS: 1/5]

Finn looked at the panel for less than half a second, and then at the five armoured men still between Team Zero and Baldwin.

Same formation. Same colours. Twenty seconds on the clock and a fresh one every time he killed.

"James." He was already moving to the next one. "Make them turn."

James understood immediately, and stopped trying to kill Royal Guards.

He had been fighting them like enemies. They were not enemies right now — they were a resource with a wall around it, and Finn was the tool that opened walls.

So James stopped attacking and started manufacturing.

He raised a dead Crown soldier behind the second guard’s shoulder, and the guard had to turn to deal with something at his back, and turning took the shield off his flank, and Finn was through the gap before it came back.

[BREAKER STACKS: 2/5]

Cillian could not do what he had done to Kargan. One arm hung dead from the shoulder and the mana behind the other was a fraction of what it had been, so he stopped trying to kill anything and used short flat bursts to make guards flinch, break their footing, take their eyes off Finn for a second at a time.

Ronan pinned. Maeve owned the angles nobody was watching. James made men turn around.

Finn finished.

The third guard felt the difference before anyone saw a panel — Finn’s axe came in on his shoulder plate and the metal folded rather than skidding, deep enough that the man’s arm dropped six inches and did not come all the way back up.

---

Behind the guards, Raymond had changed his approach.

James caught it in pieces, between bodies. Raymond had stopped fighting the way Raymond fought.

He threw a boot at Baldwin’s knee in the middle of a bind. He hooked the rim of a discarded shield with his foot and dragged it under his brother’s back step. He attacked in the half-second after separation, when both men should have been resetting, twice in a row.

It was ugly and it was rude and it worked, because Baldwin had spent thirty years knowing exactly what his younger brother did next, and none of this was it.

[PRINCE BALDWIN]

[HP: 49,200 → 46,700]

Smaller than the first one. Baldwin had already adjusted by the time it landed.

That was the thing James could not stop noticing, even while a Royal Guard was trying to open his stomach. Raymond kept finding new problems for his brother, and Baldwin kept solving them, and each one took him slightly less time than the last.

Raymond was breathing hard through his mouth now. Baldwin was breathing too.

Just less.

Then, Baldwin landed his first clean strike.