Chapter 329 - 320 — Death Decides It I

Chapter 329: Chapter 320 — Death Decides It I

From the upper tier of the Hill it did not look like an attack.

It looked like the floodlights had come down.

Sixty metres of ruined arena, white from edge to edge, with the broken stumps of ice towers standing up out of it and two holes torn through the reinforced floor — and above all of it, hanging motionless in the cold air, tens of thousands of pieces of shattered ice, every edge holding the stadium light.

Then all of it moved at once.

It did not fall. It went *sideways*, in different directions, at different speeds, and the sound that reached the stands through three layers of containment field was not a crash. It was a long dry rushing hiss, like a wave going out over shingle, and it did not stop.

Inside the barrier, it was not like that at all.

---

The first thing James registered was the noise going past his ears.

Then the cold, arriving from four sides at once, and then something the size of a fist taking him across the outside of the thigh and spinning him a quarter-turn.

He got Durendal up.

He hit two shards out of the air with it and did not touch the eleven behind them. A palm-sized piece opened his cheek. Something bigger came in low and glanced off his hip plate hard enough to fold his leg. There was ice in his hair and down the back of his collar and he could not see six feet in any direction that was not full of moving white.

`[JAMES GANNER — HP: 1,508 → 1,288]`

Above him, Alice came down.

She did not attack anything. She dropped into the space over James’s head and put one wing out flat across the direction most of it was coming from, and the sound changed — a hard continuous drumming as several hundred pieces of ice hit four metres of black wing and went off it in every direction.

She did not appear to feel it. She adjusted her shoulder once.

Fifteen metres away, Fossor came out of the ground.

Not because James called it. It came up through a section of broken flooring at an angle, dragging half a tonne of frozen debris with it — and then it stayed up, because Cormac had closed the ground.

James felt the routes go, one after another, four in about a second and a half. Ice going down into every crack the fight had opened.

There was nowhere under the arena left to be.

---

James went at the ice first, because it was the obvious thing.

He cut a formation of it out of the air — a hanging slab the size of a door coming at him edge-on — and Durendal went through it and it came apart into six pieces.

And the six pieces turned round and came back.

*Right.*

There was no destroying it. That was the entire mechanic and he had needed one exchange to be certain of it. He and Alice had spent twelve minutes breaking Cormac’s ice into more, smaller, faster ice, and the only thing cutting it did now was give the man more ammunition of a more convenient size.

Which meant the problem was not the ice.

James looked through the storm, past Alice’s wing, forty metres to the far end of the platform where Cormac was standing bloodied with both hands out and his fingers moving.

Every one of those shards was being aimed.

*He’s doing all of it. All of it, at once, from over there.*

"Alice."

She turned her head about ten degrees.

"Him. Not the ice. *Him.*"

---

Alice folded the wing and went.

The change happened faster than James expected and it was not subtle.

About a third of the shards around him stopped tracking. They kept moving — everything kept moving — but they went where they had been going instead of where James was, and a dozen of them sailed past his shoulder into a place he had been standing two seconds earlier, and did not correct.

Cormac had pulled his attention.

He was building in front of Alice again, the way he had before, walls in threes and fours to turn her — and every wall he built and every shard he pulled back to defend himself was a shard that stopped hunting James.

James came out of the storm at a run.

He sent Fossor forward on the surface, above ground, straight down the open floor, because a thing that big moving at a man is a thing that has to be answered even when it is not underneath him.

Cormac answered it. He had to. A ridge came up out of the floor at an angle and Fossor turned off it, and that was another handful of attention gone.

Three threats, one man.

---

Cormac stopped trying to hold all three.

He gave up on Fossor entirely, let it come, and put everything he had into steering Alice — a wall to her right, another low and diagonal, a third offset ahead to narrow the lane. She broke through all of them and came out of the last one exactly where he had needed her to be, and four separate slabs of the ruined arena rose off the floor at once and closed over her.

Not a wall. A box, layered, compressed, with more of it packing on from outside as fast as he could pull it.

She hit the inside of it before it finished forming.

The whole structure jumped and a crack went across two faces of it.

Cormac was already turning away.

Everybody in Croke Park understood what that meant. He was not trying to hold her. He was buying seconds, and he had perhaps five of them, and he spent every single one on James.

---

The storm came back around James all at once.

Not spread out. Concentrated — every shard on the platform that was not currently holding a door shut on a Fallen Divinity, in one converging mass, from every direction, with a bleeding man walking through the middle of it.

James did not try to block.

He moved.

He went sideways along the line of least density with his sword up, and it still cost him badly. A shard the length of a forearm went through the plate on his shoulder and out the back of it, and he had to tear it free while he was moving. Another took the meat of his thigh and opened a hand’s width of it. A third came off the ground at an angle and went into his hip under the armour.

He kept going, because standing still inside that was how a man died in four seconds.

`[JAMES GANNER — HP: 1,288 → 978]`

His breath was tearing. The cut on his cheek had frozen shut. Something in his left side had gone from *hurt* to *hurt in a way he would need to look at later*.

He was still on his feet and still moving at speed.

Ninety-six Agility and ninety-seven Endurance, and a week of Ronan taking his escape lanes away until he stopped needing them.

Cormac came through the storm and hit him.

James got Durendal in the way and the impact drove him back three metres over the ice and he did not go down.

---

They fought inside it, at four feet, with thousands of pieces of ice going past both of them.

Cormac was bleeding out of his hairline and his mouth and there was a splint of his own ice up his right arm, and he was still faster over that ground than James was.

"Just tell me," he said.

Their weapons locked and ground and came apart.

"Two years." He came in again, low, then high. "I don’t want an apology. I don’t want a confession. I’ve asked you three times in front of the whole world and you won’t give me a syllable."

James put the blade across his chest and Cormac took it on the splint.

"Is he dead."

James stopped.

It was half a second. It was less than that. It was a thing that would show up on the broadcast later and be replayed ten thousand times — the moment where a man who had not reacted to anything all afternoon simply stopped.

"Yes," said James.

Cormac’s face came apart.

It was not loud. That was the worst of it. He did not scream and he did not go berserk; his mouth opened slightly and something behind his eyes went out, and for about a second there was a twenty-four-year-old standing on a frozen platform in front of eighty thousand people with nothing left to find out.

Then he came at James with everything, and it was faster and harder than anything he had thrown in fourteen minutes.

And it was fractionally worse.

He was still enormously dangerous. He was not sloppy. But the shards around James had lost their precision by a hair, and a punch came a half-inch wide, and he over-committed one step on a leg that was already ruined.

James took the opening and put Durendal through the wreck of his flank — all the way through, to the crossguard, and turned it before he pulled it out.

`[CORMAC GANNER — HP: 620 → 380]`

---

Behind them, the box broke.

It went with a bang that flattened the noise of the crowd, and black wings came out of a cloud of flying ice, and every piece of that structure joined the storm.

James disengaged and took the anchor.

`[GRAVE STEP — 120 MANA]`

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

The world folded and came back beside Alice with the floor at a slant and his hands not entirely sure where the far end of the sword was.

He did not try to fight through it.

He stood there, blind and stupid, in the middle of an ice storm, for one full second — and Alice put a wing over him.

The drumming started up again above his head.

Then his eyes caught up, and the horizon came back level, and he straightened.

"Thanks."

"Do not do that again unless I am here."

"Noted."

---

James put Durendal away.

It took him three full seconds under Alice’s wing to do it, and it was the longest he had stood still since the count hit zero — the blade wiped once across his thigh, the point found, the sheath found, the whole thing done by feel because he could not spare his eyes for it. Two hands. The scythe needed two hands and he had been carrying a sword in one of them for fifteen minutes.

Then he reached back and took the scythe off his spine.

`[AUTHORITY RELEASE ACTIVATED]`

`[TARGET: AZRAEL’S BROKEN SCYTHE]`

`[DURATION: 30 MINUTES]`

The black came out along the broken edge, and the cold went into his hands from the inside, and the enormous flattened roar of the stadium stepped one pace further away.

He put it through the first thing that came at him — a hanging slab, edge-on, at head height.

It cut it in half.

That was all it did. No unravelling. Nothing came apart that was not physically in the path of the blade. The two halves turned in the air and came back at him like everything else.

*Right. It’s a weapon here.*

He had half expected that and it was still worth knowing. Whatever that thing did to the red under Caerleon, it did not do to a man’s honest ice.

Fine. It had two metres of reach.