Chapter 387 — Ten Into Thirty Nine I

Chapter 387: Chapter 387 — Ten Into Thirty Nine I

They sat on opposite sides of the table without anybody deciding to.

Team Zero took the window side, because that was where they always sat. Fianna took the other, with Ciara at the end nearest the screen. The equipment cases were stacked against the back wall in two rows, black for Guild Zero and green for Fianna, and Darragh’s shield leaned against the end of his row like a door taken off its hinges.

The wall screen was split. On the left, the American stream was paused at the moment the red came off the Echo, a smear of crimson frozen halfway across the court. On the right Maeve’s staff had put up a plain map of the arena, a circle with the broken walls marked round the edge and the channels drawn in as thin lines meeting in the middle.

The paused stream lit the table red.

Alice did not sit. She stood at the end of the room with her back to the wall and her wings folded.

"I’ll tell you what I’m sure of," she said. "Then you can stop listening to me."

She gave them three things.

The thing in that arena was a reconstruction of Turiel, not Turiel. Even so, the body on it was strong enough to beat one of the best solo Challengers alive, using nothing but strength and speed. And the red took damage in, held it, turned it into force and threw it back, and then it was empty for a little while before it could do the same with anything big.

"He found that," she said, nodding at the stream. "He hit it small and it gave back small, and he lived. Then he hit it with everything, and it gave everything back."

"So the gap’s safe," said Declan.

"No." Alice said it before he had quite finished. "The gap is when the red can’t hurt you. The body still can. He was never less dangerous with his Authority spent. He was only less complicated." She looked at the frozen court. "That thing walked up to a man and killed him with its hand."

James stood up and went to the map.

"We’ve seen it once," he said. "On somebody else’s stream, fighting one person. I’m not going to write a script for that. What I want is all ten of us knowing what we’re doing the moment the parts we do understand happen."

---

He and Finn split the raid by job, not by guild.

Ronan and Darragh first. Ronan stayed the main point of contact, the one who met the Echo when it came and turned it, because turning big things was what he had been doing for years. Darragh would not stand beside him. He would stay loose and mobile behind the line and put his heaviest marks on whoever the Echo actually went for. Sometimes that would be Ronan. Sometimes it would not.

"Two shields in one place is one target," said Darragh.

"That’s it," said Ronan.

They looked at each other across the table, and it was the most either of them said for an hour.

Ciara was the movement control.

"I’m not asking you to hold it," said James. "I want its lines. If it goes for someone across the court, a plane in the way. If it goes up, a plane over the top. If it switches targets, buy us two seconds so we can move."

"Two seconds might be generous." Ciara was looking at the stream, not at him. "If it can walk through that much gravity, it can crack my planes. Don’t think of them as walls. Think of them as speed bumps. Expensive ones. Every time it hits one hard, it costs me."

"Speed bumps," said James. "Fine."

Declan got the work between the windows. He would lay curses to slow it and sap its strength, layer by layer, and never put a big sudden number into it.

"Death by a thousand cuts," said Cillian.

"More or less," said Declan. "Without the cuts."

Maeve kept the whole field, the way she always did, and she got one job on top of it. She was to watch the red. She would see when the channels on the Echo began to fill, when the release started, and when they went dark after.

"You see all of us at once already," said James. "Watch it as well."

"I’ll want a second pair of eyes."

"You’ll have mine when I can."

Mara would spend most of the fight in ice, walling and slowing and closing ground. She would save the fire for the gap.

Then Ren.

"Your draw stays in," said James. "Until I call it. Whatever it looks like. If it’s down on one knee in front of you with its back turned, it stays in unless I’ve called it."

Ren nodded once.

"Understood."

He did not ask what happened if James missed the moment. He did not say he would know an opening when he saw one. He accepted it.

James noticed. It was the thing he had sat up until one in the morning looking for in other people’s footage.

Cillian got the same order from range. He could throw small things if he had to. His Lightning Impact stayed in his hand for the gap.

Finn was the pressure in between, working the space between Ronan’s defence and the damage. He would take small physical openings, shove the Echo toward wherever Ciara had built a plane, and get out on the call without going for one more.

"Without one more," said Maeve.

"I heard him." 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"I’m saying it so you hear me as well."

James put himself nowhere fixed. He would move to wherever he could see both halves of the fight.

Durendal for the ordinary exchanges. The scythe was the contingency. It had cut the red on Floor 30, and it had cut it again since. He did not know whether it would do anything to an Authority on a reconstructed fallen angel, and he was not going to find out by spending thirty minutes of Authority Release in the first minute.

"I’ll pull it when I know what we’re looking at," he said. "Not before."

Alice was his, outside the count. She would fight beside him, and she would watch. Anything Turiel did that she recognised might bring back more.

"And your undead?" said Mara.

"Nothing to raise." James tapped the map. "One boss, stone floor. No bodies. And Fossor’s useless in solid rock. If something gives me a corpse in there, I’ll use it. I’m not building anything on it."