Chapter 330 - 321 — Death Decides It II

Chapter 330: Chapter 321 — Death Decides It II

The last three minutes were the only part of the fight James ever remembered clearly afterward.

Alice went in from above. Fossor came at him along the ground on the surface. James came in at the middle with a black blade.

And Cormac defended all three, over and over, and there was nothing else in the world for either of them.

Ice went up to turn Alice. Ice went sideways to stop half a tonne of burrowing summon. Ice came off the floor in a wall between James and him.

He did it again. And again. And again.

And around the fourth time, James stopped watching the ice and started watching the *order*.

Alice first. Always Alice first — she was the thing that could end him and he answered her before anything else, every time, without a fraction of hesitation.

Fossor second, and cheaply, because it could be turned rather than stopped.

And James last, with whatever was left, because James was a man with a sword who had to cross open ground to reach him.

Every defence he built came out in that order, and it came out fast, and it was correct, and it was a habit.

James looked at what that meant.

If Alice attacked and Fossor moved and James raised the scythe, Cormac would put his ice up in three places, in that sequence, with a gap in the middle of the second and third while the shards were still travelling.

An ordinary gap. Maybe four metres wide. Open for about a second.

He could not Grave Step into it — there was no anchor there and Cormac would see the fold. He could not blast through it. There was nothing clever available at all.

He could just run.

---

He gave Cormac exactly what he was waiting for.

"Alice — go. Straight at him."

She went, high and fast and completely committed, and Cormac’s hands came up and three walls started building in front of her.

Fossor came in from the left at ground level, and Cormac’s left hand went down and ice snapped up in a ridge to turn it.

And James raised the scythe over his shoulder — big, slow, obvious, a man setting his feet forty metres out for a charge — and the last of Cormac’s shards came together into a slab across the front of him.

Three defences. In order. Exactly on time.

And a four-metre gap between the ridge and the slab where nothing had been built, because nothing was supposed to be able to get there.

James dropped the scythe out of the guard position, put his head down, and sprinted.

Ninety-six points of Agility, across ice, in a straight line.

He was through the gap before Cormac’s eyes found him.

---

Cormac recalled everything.

He did it fast — the whole storm, every shard on the platform, coming back toward him at once — and it was the right decision and it was about half a second too late, because half of it was still on the far side of the arena and James was already inside four feet.

They hit each other properly.

Not weapons. Bodies. James went into him shoulder-first and Cormac took it and drove back, and for a moment they were simply two men trying to put each other on the floor, and the ice came back around them in a howling contracting shell that put fragments into both their backs.

Cormac got his good hand between them.

James felt the blade form.

He felt it grow, from below, from the inside of the space between them, and he had about a quarter of a second to decide what to do about it — and every single thing he could do about it involved giving ground.

Giving ground meant twenty metres of separation.

Twenty metres of separation meant a man who could rebuild that entire battlefield in eight seconds.

James stayed.

The ice blade went in under his ribs on the left side, at an upward angle, and came out through the back of his armour.

He heard it more than he felt it. There was a sound, and then a cold that was not like the other cold, and then his left leg stopped taking instructions properly.

`[JAMES GANNER — HP: 978 → 588]`

Cormac’s face, eight inches away, was almost apologetic.

And James could not swing.

That was the whole of it and he had worked it out somewhere in the second before the ice went into him. There were two metres of haft in his hands and a curved blade at the far end of it and a man standing close enough that their breath was mixing, and there was not a version of physics in which any part of that weapon was going to travel through an arc and arrive.

So he did not try.

He had come through the gap with the scythe held out along his right side, and when they collided he had kept it there — and that meant the head of it had gone past Cormac entirely on the way in.

It was hanging in the air behind his cousin’s back.

James got both fists onto the haft, set his heels on the ice, and pulled.

---

Cormac understood it a fraction of a second too late, and even then he did the right thing. The plate came up — the best one he had made all day, layered, angled, built in a quarter of a second out of the shards nearest his body.

He built it between them.

In front of his chest, where the blade should have been coming from.

The black edge came into him from behind, under the shoulder blade, and the curve of it did exactly what that shape has always been for: it caught, and then it drew, and James hauled the haft back through his own hip and took the blade through his cousin on the way out.

It came free in front, through the plate, from the wrong side.

`[CORMAC GANNER — HP: 380 → 0]`

The ice blade under James’s ribs went to nothing.

James dropped onto his knees.

---

Everything fell.

Every shard in the arena — the storm still contracting around them, the walls half-built in front of a Fallen Divinity, the ridge turning Fossor aside, tens of thousands of pieces of ice hanging in the air across sixty metres of ruined platform — lost the thing that had been holding them.

They came down all at once.

It sounded like rain. That was the strange part, and it was the thing every person in that stadium said afterward: not a crash, not a collapse. A vast soft roar of falling ice, everywhere, for four or five seconds, hammering off the floor and off the broken flooring and off the containment barrier and off Alice’s wings as she came down out of the empty air.

Then it stopped.

And Croke Park was silent.

Not quiet. Silent, in a way that eighty-two thousand people should not be able to manage — a full stadium with nobody making a sound, the wind coming over the top of the Cusack Stand, the drones humming somewhere overhead.

Cormac lay on his back on the white floor.

The blood went out from underneath him slowly and did not sink into anything, spreading across the ice in a wide dark shape that kept getting bigger.

James knelt eight feet away with a hole through his side and the scythe on the ground beside his hand.

---

`[BLOOD WRIT — RESOLVED]`

`[CORMAC GANNER — DECEASED]`

`[VICTORY CONDITION MET]`

`[VICTOR: JAMES GANNER]`

The screens at both ends of the ground carried it four storeys high.

For about two more seconds, nothing happened at all.

Then eighty-two thousand people made a noise that came through three layers of containment field and hit James in the chest like a physical thing.

He got one foot under himself.

Then the other one.

He stood up on the ice, in a ruined arena, above his cousin’s body, with blood running off him onto the white, and did not raise his hands, and did not look at the stands, and did not move.