Chapter 310 - 301 — One of the Seven II

Chapter 310: Chapter 301 — One of the Seven II

Alice had exactly two options and neither of them was good, so she took the only one that kept Maeve alive.

She hit him.

The red-gold blade went in above the hip and she drove him nine metres sideways across the courtyard and put him through a table that had not existed twenty minutes ago and was not really there now.

`[THE LAST DEFENDER — HP: 55,500 → 40,700]`

Fourteen thousand eight hundred.

And the red came up around him like something boiling.

More of it than they had let him have since the fight started — an enormous banked mass of it standing off his shoulders, red enough to light the whole eastern half of the courtyard, and James was sixty metres away on the far side of it.

"He wanted that," James said. "He *wanted* that—"

---

The Last Defender did not throw all of it.

He used part of it — a fraction, precisely measured — and put it into Ronan, who was the only body left in the route between himself and James.

Ronan got the shield across in time. It did not matter very much. The discharge tore him off his feet and threw him ten metres and he came down badly on the shoulder that had been taking hits for twenty-five minutes.

Maeve went to him.

She had to. He was not getting up on his own and she was the only one who could get him up, and it took her out of the fight for as long as it took.

Which left James, sixty metres of open flagstone, and a man carrying the largest reservoir of that light anyone had seen since Caerleon.

He turned toward James with most of it still banked.

---

James was not going to run at him. There was not a version of that where he arrived.

So he used the skeleton.

The Last Defender saw where he was looking and turned to cover the eastern colonnade, because that was the sensible destination — clean angle, forty metres, arriving on the man’s open side with room to swing.

James went to the other one.

The wreck by the second column. Worse in every possible way: closer, tighter, arriving inside the man’s guard with no room, on his sword side, with a column at James’s back and nowhere at all to go if it failed.

He had spent three months learning that the best anchor was the one his opponent had not bothered to think about.

`[GRAVE STEP — 120 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,620 / 3,100]`

He came out four metres from the man instead of forty.

And the second hit him like a wall. The courtyard tilted. His hands did not know where the blade ended. He could not swing, could not turn, could not do one single useful thing, and the Last Defender was already coming round with a sword and the whole banked mass of red still on him.

Finn arrived.

He came in from the side at a dead sprint and put his shoulder and both axe hafts into the man’s arm — nowhere near enough to hurt him, more than enough to ruin the swing — and took an elbow across the face for it.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]`

"That’s the last one," Cillian said. "That is *it*."

`[THE LAST DEFENDER — HP: 40,700 → 37,800]`

The bolt hit the loaded leg and cost him the step.

And James’s vision finally caught up with his body.

He swung.

The scythe came round at the mass of red banked across the man’s chest, and it was there, and it was enormous, and it was going to work—

—and the Last Defender got the sword between them.

Steel and black light met eight inches short.

James felt it all the way to his spine. He was strong and the scythe was what it was, and the man on the other end of it was Level 67 and had been holding a weapon for longer than Ireland had existed, and James was driven backwards over his own heels and had to give three metres to keep hold of the haft.

The red was still there. All of it.

He had got everything — the anchor, the surprise, Finn’s body, Cillian’s last bolt — and it had not been enough, because the man now knew what the blade did and had decided to defend the light rather than himself.

---

"James." Maeve, on her knees beside Ronan, twenty metres back. "James, *stop chasing it.*"

"He’s guarding—"

"I know he’s guarding it. So stop arriving *after*." She hauled Ronan’s arm over her shoulder. "You keep swinging at red that already exists. He can see it and he can cover it and he can dump it. You have to be already cutting when it *forms*."

James stood there with the scythe hanging and the whole thing turned over in his head at once.

Not: hit him, then cut what gathers.

Cut the place where it was about to gather, at the same moment somebody else made it gather there.

"Maeve."

"I know."

"That needs Alice."

"I *know*."

---

They set it up under fire, which was the only way they were ever going to get to set it up.

Ronan came back into the front with his shoulder wrong and his shield caved and did not say one word about either. He put himself in the line and gave ground deliberately — backwards, at an angle, drawing the Last Defender toward the eastern half of the courtyard where Team Zero wanted him.

Finn took the far side and attacked only enough to stop him pivoting out of it, and did not once try to hurt him.

The Last Defender understood he was being walked somewhere and tried to break the pocket the way he had broken everything else all day — a hard disengage away from James, using distance the way he had used it for twenty minutes.

Ronan did not resist the movement.

He went with it, and then reversed it.

`[RONAN CLEARY — PIERCING STEP]`

He drove forward off the retreat with the shield leading and put four hundred pounds of Guardian into a man who was already moving backwards, and did not stun him, and did not knock him down, and did not need to.

He put him three metres deeper into the pocket instead of three metres out of it.

`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]`

The violet ring settled into the wound Alice had opened above the hip.

And the Last Defender knew.

James saw the moment he understood the shape of it — the brand, the pocket, the woman with black wings coming down the eastern side, and a necromancer standing with a scythe already drawn back and not moving toward him at all.

He went to spend the red before they could take it.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]`

"That’s *borrowed*," Cillian shouted, in a voice like something tearing.

It did not stop the release. It made him defend. The bolt came in at his face and he had to bring the weapon up, and the half-second he spent doing that was a half-second he did not spend emptying himself.

Finn hit the brand.

`[THE LAST DEFENDER — HP: 37,800 → 34,100]`

He turned into Finn to stop the second axe.

Alice was already coming from the other side.

And James — for the first time in the entire fight — did not wait to see the red.

He started the swing before there was anything to cut.

---

Alice landed on the brand with everything she had been holding back for twenty-five minutes.

`[THE LAST DEFENDER — HP: 34,100 → 11,600]`

The wound above the hip opened from front to back and the red surged out of every seam in him toward it, all of it, in one enormous rush, faster than it had moved all day.

The black blade was already inside the space it was arriving into.

It came apart in the air.

Not after gathering — *while* gathering. The strands came up into the path of the scythe and split against it and could not redirect, because there was nothing yet to redirect; could not discharge, because it had not finished becoming a thing that could be discharged. It reached across the cut. It failed. It reached again and failed again, and then the whole surge collapsed, and the even layer that had lain on that man since a world ended tore open from the shoulder to the hip and did not close.

The Last Defender took one step.

His leg did not hold.

---

Everything caught up with him at once.

That was the whole of it, and it took about two seconds. The red had never healed one thing about him. It had only ever let a ruined body keep working — and Alice’s blade under his arm was still in him, and the hole above his hip was still in him, and Cillian’s burns and Finn’s cuts and both of James’s earlier scythe wounds were all still exactly where they had been put.

He went down onto one knee on the flagstones.

He did not stop.

He came up off that knee with the sword and went at James, and it was not the swing of a beaten man — James got the haft across at an angle and turned it, because trying to meet it straight would have broken his arms even now.

Finn took the weapon arm at the wrist with both axes crossed.

Ronan put the shield across the only route he had left.

And Alice, who could have ended it from where she was standing, did not.

James stepped into the opening that four other people had made and put Azrael’s Broken Scythe through the man’s chest and through the last of the light on him with the same stroke.

`[THE LAST DEFENDER — HP: 11,600 → 0]`

`[MAIN STORY BOSS SLAIN — PARTY KILL]`

He went down on his side on the stones of his own courtyard.

---

Nobody moved.

The people were still there — the woman with the basket, the soldiers on the eastern wall, the child on the parapet — walking through a stronghold that had not burned yet, none of them looking at the body.

Then the red started coming off him.

It came out of the wounds and out of the seams of the armour and gathered on the flagstones beside the corpse, and every single person in that courtyard knew what came next, because they had watched this thing leave a body on three separate floors and go somewhere.

James raised the scythe.

"*Don’t.*"

He stopped.

It was Alice. It was Alice with her hand out and something in her voice that he had never heard in it before, not on Floor 20, not in a throne room, not once.

"Don’t touch it."

"Alice, if it gets—"

"*Don’t.*"

He did not.

He stood there with the black blade up and did nothing, and the red drew itself together on the flagstones, and did not go into a crack, and did not run for a door.

It thinned out where it stood and stopped being anywhere.

`[MAIN STORYLINE COMPLETE]`

`[FLOOR 30 CLEARED]`

`[LIVE BROADCAST — FLOOR CLEAR CONFIRMED]`

---

Cillian sat down on the flagstones where he was standing. Ronan let the wrecked shield fall off his arm and did not pick it up. Finn had blood coming out of his hairline and both axes still in his hands, and Maeve was walking toward all of them at about half her normal speed.

Floor 30. Cleared.

James was not looking at any of it.

He was looking at a patch of empty stone.

He turned round.

"Alice."

She was looking at the same patch.

"The man we just killed," James said. "Was that Wrath?"

Alice did not take her eyes off the floor.

"No.*