Chapter 388 — Ten Into Thirty Nine II

Chapter 388: Chapter 388 — Ten Into Thirty Nine II

The plan, when it was done, fitted on one line of Maeve’s pad.

*Hold it. Make it vent something small. When it’s empty, hit it. Then get out.*

Control the Echo without giving it big damage. Get it to throw back something they could live through. When the channels went dark, Maeve would call the gap, and James would confirm it if he could see it. Mara, Ren, Cillian, Finn and James would go in together, as much as each of them could reach, while Ronan, Darragh, Ciara and Declan kept the Echo from getting to them.

And when James called out, everyone stopped.

"Nobody finishes the spell," said James. "Nobody gets one more swing because the bar’s low. Nobody chases it. We’ve all watched what happens."

Nobody argued with that.

Ciara asked the question he had been waiting for all morning.

"What if it’s different? There’ll be ten of us, not one."

The room went quiet.

Nobody had an answer. The Tower had said it would adapt. It could be the same Echo with more health. It could be faster. It could do something the American never saw because the American was one man.

"Then the first exchange is for looking," said James. "Nobody uses their strongest anything until we know what’s changed."

Finn made a face.

"So we give it the first move."

"We give it the first move."

"I hate giving things the first move."

"He died finding things out," said Alice, from the wall. "Every time it showed him something new, he paid for it out of his own health. He had nobody to pay for him. You have nine."

Finn looked at her, and then at the map, and gave in.

That was the real advantage, James thought. It wasn’t the damage, though ten of them had a lot more of that than one man. Ten meant one of them could look while another defended, one held it and one waited with a cut in the scabbard, and if one of them went down, the whole thing did not go down with them.

---

Finn took them all down to the training hall afterward.

There was nothing pretending to be Turiel. Nobody put on a mask or stood in the middle and swung. Finn chalked a circle the size of the arena on the floor, as near as the hall allowed, and walked ten people round it until they knew where to stand and what to say.

The hall smelled of rubber matting and chalk dust. Somewhere above them a training session had been moved to make room, and nobody had turned off the extractor, so it droned the whole time over the squeak of ten pairs of boots.

James cut the calls down to four words.

*Hold.* Control only. Nothing big.

*Vent.* It was firing back. Defend.

*Open.* It was empty. The damage group went in.

*Out.* Everybody stopped, now.

Then they moved.

Ciara walked the circle, setting her planes in the air where she wanted them. She set one, looked at where Ronan would back up to, and moved it. Darragh practised switching his mark from Ronan to Finn and back again, calling it each time. Mara walked backwards from the front line until she had a clean lane past Ronan’s shoulder, and stopped. Ren stood off to one side and measured, with his feet, how much room he needed to draw. Declan found an angle on the flank where he could see the middle without being in it.

Maeve walked straight through the centre and stopped twice.

"Here," she said. "And here. You’ve got four people stood within arm’s reach of each other. If it vents here, it gets four of you."

People spread out.

Then the real problem showed itself.

Finn called a shift left. Team Zero went left without thinking. Ciara, at the same moment, stepped right to cover a gap she had seen. All of Fianna went right with her.

The ten split down the middle of the circle, and nobody noticed for three steps.

James saw it. He looked up and saw Ciara had seen it too.

"Right," said Finn. "That’s going to kill us."

He had the fix within a minute. James made all the direction calls for the whole raid. Ciara only moved Fianna on her own when one of their limits demanded it, a plane cracking or a mark running out. Everybody else went where James said first.

"Yes," said Ciara. "That’s right."

She did not make it into anything. She just nodded, and they ran it again, and this time everyone went the same way.

James ended it at half twelve.

Nobody became a perfect ten-person unit in a morning, and grinding them into the floor until they were tired would not help anything that happened in the arena.

---

The break had four days left, and they used all four.

They checked equipment twice. Armour went down to the workshop for repair and came back. Guild Zero’s staff and Fianna’s sat together over the entry confirmations, line by line, ten eligibilities checked against the Tower’s records. They set up the stream with the Tower office and agreed it.

The press outside both guilds had gone thick enough to block the road, and there was no hiding Fianna going in and out of Guild Zero’s door every morning. By the second day the international channels had all ten names on screen, and the same two arguments running.

**@kellyb_nyc:** ten is overkill. they’re scared

**@saoirse_k:** america proved one isn’t enough. sorry but it did

**@raidlead_hq:** you’re doubling the boss. this is so dumb

**@fianna_til_i_die:** CIARA KEANE IS GOING TO STOP A FALLEN ANGEL WITH A WALL. BELIEVE

**@tower_facts_daily:** she can’t hold it. read her ability. it’s delays not walls

On the last afternoon, James and Ciara ended up next to each other at the confirmation desk, comparing printouts. Her shoulder was close to his. He noticed her the way he had noticed her before, and then he went back to the paper.

"Are you nervous?" she said, without looking up.

"I’m told I don’t have the imagination for it."

She laughed, short.

"Who told you that?"

"Finn. Usually right before he says I’ve done something stupid."

"James!" Finn was waving from the door. "Kit check. Now."

---

The break ran out at midnight on the sixtieth day. The next evening, they were in the departure area.

Alice stood beside James.

It was not two groups any more. Without anybody calling it, they had stood where the plan put them. Ronan and Darragh were forward, a body’s width apart. Finn and Ciara were close enough behind to reach either side. Maeve, Mara, Declan and Cillian were spread out further back, and Ren was a little to one flank with his hand resting on the scabbard. James stood in the middle, where he could see all of it.

The light came up on the wall. The stream was live.

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** TEN. ALL TEN. THERE THEY ARE

**[fianna_ffs]:** FIANNA FIANNA FIANNA

**[sligo_sean]:** the fallen angel’s going in too??

**[EagleEyeTX]:** don’t die like he did. just kill it

**[kpop_and_tanks]:** scaling for ten is going to be insane

`[FLOOR 39 — ENTRY REQUEST]`

`[ELIGIBLE CHALLENGERS: 10/10 CONFIRMED]`

`[REANIMATED — ANATHEMA — BOUND TO: JAMES GANNER]`

`[NOT COUNTED AS PARTICIPANT]`

James looked at each of them once.

Ronan nodded. Darragh nodded. Finn rolled his shoulders. Ciara met his eyes, and he saw no joke in them now. Maeve gave him nothing at all, which meant she was ready.

Nobody needed a speech.

He started the floor.

---

It was the same court.

It had the same broad ring of broken black walls, and the same open stone under their feet, flat for two hundred metres with nothing on it. The same thin red lines came in through the floor from every side and bent toward the middle.

He had watched it on a screen three times. Standing in it was colder. It was very quiet. The air had the dry, faintly burnt smell of old stone that had been in a fire once and never quite stopped remembering it, and his boots made no echo at all, as if the walls were too far away to bother.

Somebody behind him breathed out, slowly. He thought it was Mara.

`[FLOOR 39]`

`[BOSS FLOOR]`

`[PARTICIPANTS: 10]`

`[ENCOUNTER PARAMETERS ADJUSTED]`

James did not know what *adjusted* meant.

Nobody else did either.

Then the channels began to move.

The ten of them spread into the shape they had walked in chalk. Ronan went forward with Darragh off his shoulder. Ciara’s hand came up. Ren’s thumb went to the guard, and stopped there. Behind James, Alice opened her wings, and he heard them go wide.

The red ran inward across the stone, all of it at once, and climbed up in the middle of the court.

The black wings came in layer by layer, and the broken halo closed over the head, and did not quite close.

`[ECHO OF WRATH]`

`[RECONSTRUCTED ENTITY]`

The Echo opened its eyes.

"Hold," said James.

Nobody attacked.