Chapter 389 — Death Against Wrath I

Chapter 389: Chapter 389 — Death Against Wrath I

The Echo did not look at Ronan.

It looked past him, and past Finn, across eighty metres of open stone to where James stood in the middle of the formation with Alice a step ahead of him and her wings already open.

Its face changed. It was a small change, a tightening at the corner of the mouth, the way someone looks when they see a face in a crowd they did not expect to see again.

"Lust," it said.

Alice’s wings snapped wider, and then it came.

It did not run. It went low and flat across the court with its wings half folded, and the air it pushed in front of it hit James in the face a full second before the Echo did.

James was already moving. Durendal was in his hand before he had decided anything. He went right as Finn went left, and Ronan drove into the lane in front of them with his shield up. Behind the Echo, Ciara’s hand came round, and a plane went up across its back, set in the air between it and the open middle of the court.

Alice took the collision on her wings.

The stone under her boots cracked in a star. She went back three metres, then five, with her heels gouging lines in the floor, and the sound of it was like a car hitting a wall.

She held it. She was the strongest thing on the floor apart from the Echo, and she held it only just.

James cut it.

Durendal went in across the Echo’s ribs while its arms were full of Alice, and he felt the blade bite into something denser than flesh. The cut opened and closed. A sliver came off the bar over its head, and that was all.

Finn’s axe came in from the other side, a short measured chop with nothing extra on it. Ronan put his shield into the Echo’s shoulder and turned it, so that when it came off Alice it was facing the wall and not the people behind him.

It tried to go back the way it had come.

It hit Ciara’s plane.

It stopped dead, the whole weight of it, as if it had run into the side of a building. For a moment it hung there against nothing. Then cracks went through the air behind it, white lines spreading across the plane like ice on a puddle.

The plane only held for two seconds, but they were two seconds nobody had given the American.

Declan’s first curse went on in that time, a dark mark sinking into the Echo’s back between the wings. Mara dropped her staff and the floor under the Echo’s feet went white, and frost ran out across the stone in a ring.

James saw it all while he was still swinging. Not one of them would kill this thing. Every one of them had just bought him time.

The plane broke.

The Echo went through it with a sound like a window going, and its momentum carried it on into the broken wall at the edge of the court. A section of black stone that had been leaning for however long the floor had existed came down on top of it in a slide of rubble.

The Echo came out of it immediately. What it left behind was the inside of the wall.

The wall had been built round bones. There were ribs, skulls, long bones packed in mortar the way you would pack a drystone wall with rubble. Old, brown, and dry. They were the dead of whatever this place had been, built into it.

*If something gives me a corpse,* James thought.

He was at the rubble in three strides with his left hand flat on the nearest skull.

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×2`

`[MANA: 2,940 / 3,100]`

Two skeletons pulled themselves out of the wall in a shower of mortar dust. They were old and brittle, and they were his.

He sent one wide left, and one round toward the Echo’s rear. They would not hurt it. They were something for it to break that was not a person. And they were somewhere for him to go.

"Test," he called. "Small."

Cillian threw a thin crack of lightning from range, nowhere near full. James put Durendal across the Echo’s forearm as it turned. Finn added one more chop, and pulled back.

The crimson under the Echo’s skin brightened.

"Vent!"

---

The red came out in three pieces.

On the American’s stream it had gone at one man, because there was only one man. Here it split. One line of crimson force tore toward James. One went toward Finn. One went back across the court toward Cillian, sixty metres away, who had barely done anything.

It went for everyone who had hurt it.

Ronan threw himself into Finn’s line, shield first, and took it. Darragh’s hand came up and a pale mark settled on Cillian’s chest a heartbeat before the red reached him. James did not try to block his with Durendal. He had no idea whether a sword could block an Authority, and he was not going to find out with his ribs. He dived behind the line of his nearest skeleton.

Ciara got there first.

A plane went up across his path at an angle, and the red hit it. The plane split down the middle with a crack James felt in his teeth, but it turned the force, bent it a few degrees off true. Instead of the middle of him it took the edge.

The edge was enough to put him on his back.

`[HP: 1,738 / 2,048]`

Ronan was down on one knee behind his shield, getting up. Cillian was standing, swearing, with the mark on his chest fading.

Ten people meant ten people to protect. James got up anyway.

The crimson under the Echo’s skin went dull.

Alice saw it. "Empty."

"Open!"

James went in himself. He did not stand back and watch everyone else do it.

He came in beside Finn with Alice above them both. When the Echo turned toward Finn, James put his left hand almost on its ribs and fired.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,880 / 3,100]`

Black force went into its side at point-blank range and it rocked. Alice hauled one wing back and out of the way with both hands, and James cut across the gap she had made. Behind him the frost under the Echo turned to steam, and Mara went from ice to fire in one breath. A sheet of flame rolled across the Echo’s back. Cillian’s lightning came down like a dropped cable.

Then Ren drew.

James did not see the draw. He saw Ren standing still with his hand on the hilt, and then he saw Ren standing still with the blade out and the scabbard empty. A line had appeared across the Echo from shoulder to hip, and Ren was already sliding back out of reach.

The bar dropped. It took a real piece, more than the American had managed in all of his first ten minutes.

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** THAT’S A WINDOW. THAT’S A REAL WINDOW

**[fianna_ffs]:** REN MORI YOU BEAUTIFUL MAN

**[sligo_sean]:** wait did it call the angel LUST??

**[raidlead_hq]:** ok the retaliation splits per attacker. thats why they brought 10

**[kpop_and_tanks]:** it splits so they need MORE people to survive it?? the opposite

James saw crimson begin to rise through the Echo’s skin again, faint, like a coal blown on.

"Out!"

They obeyed.

Mara had a second fireball half-formed in her hand. She closed her fist on it and it went out. Ren slid his blade back into the scabbard instead of reaching for another cut. Cillian let his charge fall away. Finn took one step toward it, every line in his body wanting the next swing, and then he turned on his heel and broke off because James had said to.

James saw all of it on his way back. *That’s why,* he thought. *That’s exactly why.*

---

The Echo did not let them do it again the same way.

It stopped going for Ronan, and it stopped going for Alice. It feinted at Ronan’s shield, and then, in the air, its wings snapped and it changed direction entirely and went for Ciara.

She had a hand up to set a plane in front of herself. James knew what that would cost her.

His rear skeleton was fifteen metres from her.

`[GRAVE STEP — MANA COST: 120]`

`[MANA: 2,760 / 3,100]`

The world folded, and he was beside Ciara’s flank. The second hit him the way it always did, with his balance arguing with his eyes and the ground in the wrong place.

Finn arrived in that second. He took the Echo’s first swing on the flat of an axe and went sideways with it.

Then James had his feet.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,700 / 3,100]`

He put it into the Echo’s side and drove Durendal across its path, and it turned to him instead of reaching Ciara.

Ciara did not need rescuing twice. She did not put a plane in front of herself. She put one behind the Echo, at an angle.

James and Finn pushed. The Echo went backward, hit the plane side-on, and slid along it. It came off the far end going exactly where she had sent it, straight at Ronan.

Ronan was waiting. Darragh’s mark settled on him just before it arrived.

He did not try to stop it. He took the charge on the shield and turned with it, letting it go past him. As it went past, Alice came down on its exposed side like something dropped off a roof. Declan’s second curse went on in the same moment, and the Echo’s wing caught James’s rear skeleton on the way past and turned it into a cloud of bone.

Nobody said anything. There wasn’t time. But for the first time in the fight there weren’t two parties on the floor, only one.

James stayed close. He worked Durendal through every gap Ronan and Finn and Alice opened. He made his cuts small, because the red was filling again, and he used Necro Blast once more, only when the Echo’s feet were already moving toward Maeve.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,640 / 3,100]`

The curse was starting to tell. The Echo was still terrifying, still faster than anyone on the floor, but its first step was a fraction slower than it had been. That fraction was the difference between Ronan’s shield being in the right place and being late.

James realised that Declan had done less visible damage than anybody in the raid, and was keeping half of them alive.

The Echo went for Maeve.

James sent his last skeleton across its line. It did not stop it. The Echo went through it without slowing and it came apart like a dropped box of sticks. But going through it cost a step, and in that step Mara threw up a wall of ice and Ciara set a plane behind the ice. The Echo broke the ice, and hit the plane, and by then James and Alice were in front of Maeve.

The crimson under its skin flared.

"Stop! Nobody hits it. Vent!"

It did something the American had never made it do.

It went into the middle of them, deliberately, driving through the formation into the centre of ten people. Then it let go.

The red went out in branches at close range, everywhere at once.

Ciara set two planes, one and then the other, so fast they nearly overlapped, and each one turned a branch away from Mara and Declan. Both of them cracked straight through. Darragh had one strong mark to give, and he gave it to Ciara. If she went down now, nothing would stop it moving anywhere.

That meant Ronan took his without it.

The red hit him in the chest and he went off his feet and over, and when he came down he did not get straight up. Maeve was beside him in two steps with her hands already glowing, and her eyes still on the Echo.

One branch came for James. Grave Step was still cooling. He threw himself sideways and the edge of it caught his hip and spun him into the stone.

`[HP: 1,318 / 2,048]`

The crimson went dark.

"It’s empty," said Maeve, kneeling over Ronan.

"Open!"