Chapter 263 — The Stronger Brother II

Chapter 263: Chapter 263 — The Stronger Brother II

It came across Raymond’s side above the hip and opened both the plate and what was underneath it, and the cloth beneath went dark immediately and kept going dark. Raymond’s back foot slid and he caught himself on it.

He attacked again inside two seconds, because backing off meant handing Baldwin the tempo, and handing Baldwin the tempo was how this ended early.

---

The Royal Guard worked out what was happening to them.

They stopped treating Finn as one of five problems and started treating him as the problem. Two of them broke off Ronan entirely and went at him together.

The first caught Finn’s right axe against his shield and simply held it there, pinning the weapon, and the second came in low at his exposed ribs.

Ronan got there.

Late, and one-armed, and unable to do more than swing the carried shield into the line of it — so the strike came off-line rather than stopping, and it went into Finn’s side under the last one instead of through it.

Finn made a noise and stayed up and did not lose the axe.

James killed a Crown soldier who had wandered into the fight from the wider battle — the war was still going on around all of this, and men kept walking into it who had nothing to do with anybody — and put him back up on his feet behind the pinning guard.

The skeleton got both arms around the guard’s weapon arm and held it for about one second before being destroyed.

One second was the going rate.

Finn tore his axe free and killed him.

[BREAKER STACKS: 3/5]

The next strike he threw cracked a Royal Guard’s breastplate down the centre line. Not dented. Cracked, with the metal opening along the seam.

Away to the left, a guard peeled off and went wide toward James, who had both hands full of dead men and was not looking.

Maeve intercepted him. She did not have anything new; she had what she had always had, and she put a barrier edge-on across his path so he ran his shoulder into it, and then went at him with the focus in both hands like a woman who had run out of subtlety three hours ago.

"Cillian—"

He gave her one burst. It was small and it was badly aimed and it was enough to put the guard on his back.

[CILLIAN — MANA STRAIN CRITICAL]

Cillian’s remaining hand came up shaking afterward. He tried to close it into a fist and the fingers would not fully answer, and he looked at them for a moment with an expression James had never seen on him before, and then put the hand down and kept standing where he was.

---

Then Raymond produced the best thing he did all day.

He let Baldwin bind him again.

He let it happen the way it had happened three times already, walked into it, gave his brother the crossed blades and the close distance that Baldwin had been winning with all fight — and Baldwin took it, because it had worked three times.

And then Raymond stopped pushing.

All the pressure went out of his blade at once. Baldwin’s own force carried him a fraction forward into nothing, and Raymond changed sides — going under and around rather than through — and came up on the other line entirely with his shoulder already driving into Baldwin’s chest.

The pommel caught Baldwin under the jaw.

Raymond’s cut followed it, hard, across the thigh and hip, and Baldwin’s leg went out from under him and put him down on one knee in the mud.

The Irish feed lost its mind.

James saw it through a two-foot gap between two Royal Guards and actually looked twice — turned his head back to the fight, then turned it again, because for one absurd moment a Level 50 frontier commander had a Level 60 Crown Warlord kneeling in front of him.

Raymond went to finish it.

[PRINCE BALDWIN]

[SKILL ACTIVATED: CROWN’S ASCENDANCY — S-RANK]

The panel meant nothing to Raymond. He never saw it and would not have understood it.

What he experienced was that his brother moved sooner than he was supposed to be able to.

Baldwin came off the knee before the finishing cut had reached full extension, caught Raymond’s blade on his own while it was still building, and knocked it wide of his body — not blocking it, *taking* it, at a point in the swing where taking it should not have been possible.

Raymond compensated. It was fast and it was correct and it was too late, because Baldwin was already inside him.

The hilt hit Raymond across the face for the second time that fight.

Raymond staggered, and Baldwin cut him across the upper chest before he had finished staggering, and when Raymond got his sword up for the next one the block was clean and perfect and completely inadequate. He was driven backward three full steps by a strike he had correctly stopped.

He tried changing his rhythm again — the ugly work, the knee kicks, the wrong-timing attacks that had been buying him openings all fight.

It bought him less this time.

Because Baldwin was no longer having to predict him. Baldwin was fast enough now to simply watch what Raymond did and answer it afterward, and a man who has to be surprising against an opponent who no longer needs to guess is a man running out of road.

Raymond was not weak. Nothing about that was weak. He had killed Baldwin’s Lord Commander forty minutes ago with two open wounds in him, and he was still standing here forcing a level-sixty prince to work.

Baldwin was simply stronger, and the gap was showing itself one exchange at a time, and there was nothing dramatic about it at all.

Raymond bought one more hit.

He took Baldwin’s blade across his shoulder on purpose — walked into it, let it open him to get inside the arc — and drove his own sword across his brother’s armour at the waist.

[PRINCE BALDWIN]

[HP: 46,700 → 43,900]

Then Baldwin ended it.

He trapped Raymond’s blade at close range, put his hand on Raymond’s forearm, and turned him — controlling the weapon and the arm holding it, walking him off his own balance the way you steer something rather than fight it.

Raymond pulled to free the sword.

Baldwin hit him before it came loose. The second strike broke his guard open entirely, and the third went in across his side and out through everything the earlier wound had already weakened, and Raymond went down into the mud on his back.

He tried to get up immediately.

One knee came under him. The other leg simply did not answer. He got the point of his sword into the ground and hung on it with both hands and held himself there, upright by about thirty degrees, and could not do any more than that.

Baldwin walked toward him.

He did not say anything. There was no gloating in it, and no triumph, and somehow that was the worst thing James had seen on that field all day — a man crossing eight meters of mud to finish a war, unhurried, the way he had killed the orc and the ogre.

---

"FINN!"

James did not know he had shouted until he heard it.

Finn was already there. The guard Cillian had dropped came apart under an axe strike before he could finish standing back up.

[BREAKER STACKS: 4/5]

And the two remaining Royal Guards stopped trying to meet him.

They gave ground. They kept their shields up and stepped backward and would not engage, because engaging a man whose axes were now going through plate was suicide and they had worked that out.

Which was exactly what Finn wanted, because a guard who gives ground is a guard who is not standing between anybody and anything.

Ronan came in from the side and drove them with the shield, using his bodyweight, herding rather than fighting. Maeve sealed the angle they were backing toward. James put his last two skeletons around the far side to close the other one.

The two of them compressed into four meters of space with nowhere left to go.

Finn killed the first one.

[BREAKER STACKS: 5/5]

[MAXIMUM BREAKER STACKS REACHED]

The last Royal Guard did the only thing left to him. He planted his feet directly between Team Zero and his prince, brought the shield up, set his weight, and stood there — a heavy man in heavy plate, doing the last part of his job.

Finn hit him with both axes.

The shield did not go flying and the man did not leave his feet. The rim folded. The boss cracked. His forearm went with it, and his stance came apart underneath him, and everything he had been holding together collapsed inward about eight inches — and Finn came through the hole that made and finished it.

The lane opened.

---

James looked down it.

Twenty meters of churned mud and bodies. Raymond on one knee, hanging off his own sword. Baldwin standing over him with his blade already coming up.

Twenty meters was nothing and it was everything. Nobody on Team Zero was going to cross it in time — not Finn, cut open and slowing, not Ronan carrying a shield he could not wear, not Cillian with two arms that no longer worked.

James’s eyes went across the ground between.

There was a corpse two meters directly behind Baldwin. Clean, close, entirely in his blind arc, and the single most obvious place on that field for a man with James’s skill to appear.

There was another one four meters out on Baldwin’s sword side, half under the carcass of a dead horse — a worse angle, an extra stride from Raymond, and in plain view of the man he was jumping at.

Vane had killed him for taking the obvious one. Morcant had stood in a lane for an hour waiting for him to take the obvious one.

And Baldwin had spent this entire battle proving that he did not need to guess in advance, because he was fast enough to answer things after they happened — which meant the blind spot behind him was not a blind spot at all. It was a place he had already decided what to do about.

James took the one under the horse.

[GRAVE STEP ACTIVATED]

[MANA COST: 120]

The world went away.

Behind him, Maeve saw the shift begin and knew exactly what it meant and could not close twenty meters in the time it would take. Finn turned from the dead guard with an axe still in the wound. Ronan started forward at a run he could not sustain. Cillian raised a hand that had nothing left in it and lowered it again.

Baldwin’s sword reached the top of its arc and started down.

James landed behind the dead horse, four meters out, on the wrong side of a man who could see him arrive.

And the world did not come with him.

For one entire second there was nothing but shapes — a dark upright shape and a lower broken one and the churned brown of the ground, sliding around each other, refusing to resolve. He could not see the sword. He could not see Raymond. He could not tell how far he had to go.

What he could hear was steel moving through air, and it was already moving.

James did not wait for his eyes.

He came off the carcass into the sound with Durendal going up, and covered four meters he could not see across, and knew while he was doing it that he was arriving late.

Then the world snapped into place.

He was at Raymond’s shoulder. Baldwin’s blade was already halfway down.

And Durendal was rising into its path.