Chapter 328 - 319 — Blood on Ice III (Bonus)

Chapter 328: Chapter 319 — Blood on Ice III (Bonus)

Cormac crossed the distance flat out. A spike came up out of the floor behind James’s heels and took the retreat away.

He went high.

James got Durendal up and blocked it.

And a second formation came out of the ice around his rear boot and held it — not much, an inch of new ice around the heel and the sole, but it stopped him moving for half a second.

Cormac’s fist went into his stomach.

`[JAMES GANNER — HP: 1,718 → 1,508]`

Every bit of air James had went out of him. He came off the ground and back three metres and he did not go down.

Six Endurance points. He would not have described it as strength. It was closer to being a heavier object.

Cormac was already there with the blade coming at his throat.

James got Durendal across it.

**CLANG.**

They locked with both weapons a foot from both faces, and Cormac leaned on it and started forcing it down, and he was strong and he was on ground that agreed with him.

Behind them, the shell broke.

**BOOM.**

Black wings came out through a cloud of flying ice.

Cormac’s eyes went to her.

Half a second.

James kicked the lead leg out from under him, made two metres of space, and took the only anchor on the battlefield.

`[GRAVE STEP — 120 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,800 / 3,100]`

---

He came out beside Alice with the world tilting.

And he did not wait for it.

That was the whole of what a week in a padded hall had bought him. He had spent six days arriving badly with a Fallen Divinity and a burrowing summon already moving around him, over and over, until he stopped needing his eyes to be right before his hands were.

He moved on what he had known before he stepped.

"High," he said, and went low.

Alice went high.

Fossor was already under the ice on Cormac’s left, and James felt it come round.

Cormac saw Alice first — anyone would — and threw ice upward.

James cut the lower structure in half before it had finished forming, and Cormac had to change his defence to the ground, and the moment he did, Alice came through what was left of the top.

He was driven sideways.

He put his foot down into the escape and the floor went out from under it.

Fossor came up through the ice and caught the leg, and Cormac twisted himself in the air rather than be thrown into Alice, and it cost him everything he had left in that second.

James reached him.

Durendal went through the last ice plate on his flank and into him, and the blood came out over James’s hand and his forearm and down onto the white floor in a wide spatter.

`[CORMAC GANNER — HP: 880 → 690]`

Cormac froze the ground around Fossor’s grip until the summon had to let go or lose the limb, and Alice hit him again, and he spent an entire two-metre block of ice to eat most of it and the rest of it threw him twenty metres.

---

The arena was coming apart.

Ice towers stood in broken stumps all over the platform. Two whole sections of reinforced flooring had collapsed into the holes Fossor had opened. A wing had clipped a pillar in the exchange and put a spray of fragments into the containment field hard enough to make thirty metres of it flare white, and the people in the first six rows behind it had come out of their seats even though nothing was ever going to get through.

The drones had climbed ten metres and were holding further out.

*"He’s stopped contesting her,"* one commentator said, fast, over the noise. *"Watch him — he’s not trying to hit Alice anymore, he hasn’t tried since that first exchange, everything he builds is to move her—"*

*"And Ganner’s using them to close doors. He’s not just pointing them at him. He’s taking away every direction the man can go."*

---

Cormac was on one knee at forty metres, and he was in a bad way.

Blood ran down the left side of his face from somewhere in the hairline. One shoulder plate hung off him by a strap. He had ice built up around his right arm above the elbow in a way that was not armour, that was closer to a splint.

His breath came out white and ragged.

James walked toward him carefully.

Alice circled wide. Fossor moved underneath.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,740 / 3,100]`

It went through the wreck of the chest armour and put Cormac down onto both knees.

`[CORMAC GANNER — HP: 690 → 620]`

Eighty-two thousand people stood up.

---

James did not go faster.

That was the thing he noticed about himself afterwards. The whole stadium was screaming for it, the commentary had gone up an octave, Alice had turned in the air and was coming round, and James Ganner slowed down.

Because Cormac was too calm.

There was blood dripping off his chin and freezing when it hit the floor, and one arm was in a splint made of the thing that was killing him, and he was kneeling in the middle of a ruined arena with three things closing on him.

And he had not looked at any of them.

He was looking at the ground.

James’s eyes went where Cormac’s were, and for the first time in eleven minutes he actually *saw* the battlefield.

Ice.

Everywhere.

Broken walls in stumps. Whole sections of the shell Alice had come out of, lying in slabs. The guards James had cut off his forearms in the first minute, still out there somewhere near the edge. Spikes snapped off at the base. Ridges. Fragments the size of a hand, the size of a coin, the size of a door. Sheets of it over the entire floor and chunks of it packed into the broken flooring where Fossor had come through.

Cormac had made an enormous amount of ice in eleven minutes.

James and Alice had spent eleven minutes breaking all of it.

---

Cormac put his bloody left palm flat down on the frozen ground.

Nothing happened for about a second.

Then James heard a sound.

It was very small and it came from everywhere at once — a thin, dry, continuous cracking, from behind him and beside him and forty metres away and directly underneath, all at the same time.

He looked left.

A slab of the wall Alice had detonated ninety seconds ago was trembling on the ice.

A fragment behind his right boot turned over, slowly, on its own.

Something the size of a shield, out near the containment barrier, ground half an inch sideways.

Hundreds of others answered it.

The temperature dropped again — harder than the first second of the fight, hard enough that James’s next breath came out and hung in front of his eyes and stayed there. Frost went across Durendal’s crossguard and up the first four inches of the blade. The blood on his sleeve stiffened and went dark.

Alice’s wings opened wide.

And beneath the floor, the pressure at the back of James’s skull went violently sideways and then straight up — Fossor coming out early, breaking surface in a shower of broken ice, because four separate routes had closed on it at once.

Cormac stood up.

He did it slowly, and badly, on a leg that did not entirely want to take him. His body was wrecked. He was breathing through his mouth in short white bursts. He was, by every number on every screen in that stadium, losing.

But he did not need to stand in front of her anymore.

---

The ice came up off the floor.

All of it.

Fragments the size of a fingernail rose out of the frost in their thousands. Broken guard-plates. Snapped-off spike heads. Wall sections a metre across, lifting flat like tabletops. Jagged shards of his own shattered armour. Whole slabs of the shell.

They came up around James, and around Alice in the air, and around Fossor where it stood half out of the broken floor, from every direction at once — off the ground, out of the collapsed flooring, off the base of the containment barrier — and then they stopped, and hung there, perfectly still.

The stadium got quiet in a way that eighty-two thousand people are not supposed to be able to do.

The commentary went with it.

*"...Every wall she broke."*

*"He never lost it. He never lost any of it. It’s all still—"*

*"It’s ammunition. It has been ammunition the entire time."*

Cormac closed his bloody hand.

`[WINTER’S CLAIM]`

`[ALL ICE CREATED BY THE USER WITHIN RANGE REMAINS SUBJECT TO CONTROL UNTIL DISMISSED OR DESTROYED BEYOND RECOVERY]`

---

James turned once, all the way round, and there was no clean direction anywhere.

Above him, Alice hung in the middle of a sphere of it with her wings half open.

Below and to the left, Fossor was above ground and surrounded and had nowhere to go down.

And in every square metre of that ruined arena, tens of thousands of pieces of ice hung motionless under the Croke Park floodlights, and every single edge on every single one of them caught the white light and held it.

They had spent eleven minutes destroying his battlefield.

They had spent eleven minutes spreading it.

Across from him, bloodied, splinted, barely above a third of his health, Cormac Ganner stood with his hand closed around nothing at all.

Then he opened his fingers.

`[WINTER’S CLAIM — RELEASE]`

Everything moved.