Chapter 382 — America’s No 1 II

Chapter 382: Chapter 382 — America’s No 1 II

The next time the sideways pull caught it, the Echo did not fight it.

It opened its wings and leaned into the push instead of against it. It let the force throw it, and used it. Its path bent through the air in a long curve that did not go where the American had sent it, and came round toward him from the side where he had no slab.

The American pushed it back with gravity.

The Echo slowed down.

But it kept coming.

He pushed harder. The air in front of him went thick and wrong, and every loose stone between them was blasted away across the court, and the Echo leaned into it with its wings back and came through anyway.

It reached him.

At the last instant the American shifted his own weight in the air, pulling himself a metre sideways, and the first punch did not land clean. It caught him on the edge and still threw him across the arena like a kicked bag, and the slab he had been standing on burst into gravel behind him.

He hit the ground and rolled.

**[EagleEyeTX]:** GET UP

**[sligo_sean]:** distance distance DISTANCE

**[mn_tank_main]:** that was a glancing hit and he lost a third of his bar

**[NotABot_Honest]:** it only needed to touch him once

**[kpop_and_tanks]:** oh no

The American was up before the Echo landed. He did not panic, and James saw that too.

He dropped the biggest downward field he had used yet, right on top of the Echo. The centre of the court collapsed under it, and the Echo went down onto one knee in the middle of the hole. While it was down he laid sideways pressure across the same patch of ground, pinning it from two directions, and backed away across the court until he had sixty metres again.

James saw what he was doing.

Chipping it would take all night, and he was not going to get all night. He wanted one window, and one big hit.

The American raised both hands.

The pressure on the Echo doubled. The crater went from a metre deep to three, and the stone round the edges folded inward like wet paper. The Echo went down under it, all the way down, and its bar dropped.

It was a real drop. It took nearly a fifth of the bar in one go.

**[GravityGang]:** HUGE

**[EagleEyeTX]:** THATS IT THATS THE WINDOW

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** NO the red. look at the red

**[mn_tank_main]:** get out get out get out

The crimson lit across the Echo’s whole body at once, brighter than anything before it.

The retaliation came out of the hole.

The American turned the gravity round on himself, and it was not enough. His defence took some of it and then broke, and the rest went through him and threw him across the court into the base of the wall. James saw his HP bar fall and keep falling, and then stop near the bottom.

The Echo was already climbing out of the crater.

---

From then on it went quickly.

The American got up. He was hurt and slower, but he still did everything right. He cycled through what had worked before, in order: down, sideways, push.

It did not matter any more, because the Echo was too close for any of it to buy him time.

It walked through the downward field. James could see the floor breaking under its feet, so the gravity was still working, and it walked anyway.

He threw it sideways. It opened one wing and corrected in the air and came back on line.

He pushed it away. It leaned into the push.

The second clean hit landed.

The American went down, and his bar was almost empty.

**[EagleEyeTX]:** RUN

**[sligo_sean]:** WHERE. where does he run. its a circle

**[GravityGang]:** come on come on come on

**[NotABot_Honest]:** this floor isnt meant to be cleared yet

**[chi_raid_lead]:** what is this

**[kpop_and_tanks]:** he’s done everything right

**[MOD]:** Slow mode enabled.

It made no difference. The feed was still going faster than James could read. Lines came up and went off the top of the screen before he had got to the end of them. The commentators had stopped commentating. One of them just kept saying "Come on," and the other was not saying anything.

The American got up onto one knee.

He put his hand out one last time and pinned it. The whole floor round the Echo buckled, so that even now, even with almost nothing left, the gravity still worked.

The Echo walked through it.

It reached him before he could make another gap, and hit him once with a bare hand.

That was all it did. It used no red and no light, and nothing about it was special. It was a man hitting another man.

`[CHALLENGER DECEASED]`

For about two seconds the chat was a wall.

**[EagleEyeTX]:** no

**[GravityGang]:** stream froze. its frozen. refresh

**[DubLadDave]:** what just happened

**[kpop_and_tanks]:** that was an ECHO??

**[mn_tank_main]:** if that’s the echo what is the real one

**[sligo_sean]:** that was an echo

Somebody posted his name. Then fifty people did, and it was the only thing on the feed.

Then the Tower stream ended.

The chat went with it, and the left half of the wall screen went black.

Nobody in the operations room spoke.

Somewhere at the back, one of the recruits sat down on the edge of a desk, and James heard the desk creak.

He went over what he had seen, because that was what his head did.

The American had not been weak. He had not been reckless or stupid. His gravity had worked on it from the first second to the last. He had damaged it. He had worked out the retaliation inside one exchange, and he had changed the whole fight around that, and then changed it again when it turned out to be wrong. He had survived hits that would have killed most people on Earth, and he had done it because he was good.

He was still dead.

And the System had called the thing that killed him an Echo.

James looked round.

Alice was still standing behind the chairs, looking at the black half of the screen where the court had been. She felt him looking and turned her head, and he saw on her face that she had nothing new to give him. She did not know any more than she had known an hour ago.

On the right half of the screen, the American studio had come back from wherever it had gone. The older commentator had his hand flat on the desk. Behind him, the broadcast graphic was already up.

`[FLOOR 39 ATTEMPT FAILED]`

`[CHALLENGER DECEASED]`

Floor 39 was still uncleared.

The world started on it straight away. A clip of the Echo standing up in the crater was already going round. An analyst was being patched in from somewhere, talking about "delayed retaliation" before anybody had asked her. The public comment section under the broadcast was filling faster than anyone could moderate it, the same three words over and over in about nine languages.

In the operations room, nobody moved.

James did not open his interface. He did not look at Floor 39.

On the screen, the broadcast went back to the replay. The Echo of Wrath rose up out of the American’s gravity field in the middle of the court, with its wings dragged down behind it and the floor breaking under its feet, and stood. Underneath it, the comments ran past too fast to read.