Chapter 396 — Wrath Cannot Judge Death IV

Chapter 396: Chapter 396 — Wrath Cannot Judge Death IV

It was not the red this time. There was no mechanism, no judgment, no clever sentence. Turiel simply tried to go through Ronan, because Ronan was standing between him and Death, and going through him was the fastest way.

Ronan caught the first blow on his shield. The shield was already split from the earlier exchanges, and it split further, a crack going right up the face of it. Ronan reset his feet.

Turiel hit him again, and the shield gave. What was left of it hung off Ronan’s arm by the straps.

James moved. He started to go round Ronan, because he could see Ronan could not survive another exchange.

Ronan moved with him.

He did it without turning round. He stepped sideways as James stepped sideways, and kept his body exactly between James and Turiel, the way he had stood in front of James for years without anyone ever needing to tell him to.

Finn came in to help and Turiel backhanded him without looking, and Finn went across the floor and hit a column.

Maeve’s light went into Ronan’s back before the next blow even landed. She was putting it in as fast as she could, and it was not fast enough. Turiel was making damage faster than she could replace it.

The next blow broke Ronan’s left shoulder. James heard it go. The arm with the remains of the shield on it dropped and swung and did not come up again.

Ronan stayed where he was.

He did not say anything, and he did not look back. He stood in front of James with one arm hanging and the other up in a fist, because a fist was what he had left.

The last blow killed him.

`[PARTY MEMBER DECEASED — RONAN CLEARY]`

The space in front of James was empty.

That was all he felt. It was not grief yet. It was the physical shock of the place where Ronan always stood having nothing in it. Turiel was already stepping through it.

---

There were seven of them left. James, Finn, Maeve, Cillian, Ciara and Declan, and Alice.

James made a decision, because there was nothing else he could do with what had just happened.

"No more holding back," he said. "Nothing for later. There isn’t a later. Everything goes on his routes. *Now.*"

They did it.

Declan put every curse he had left onto Turiel at once, layer on layer, knowing that when they ran out he would have nothing. His hands were shaking. He kept them up.

Cillian spent the last of his lightning, but not on damage. He used short, sharp bolts into Turiel’s feet and knees, every time Turiel tried to plant one, so that he was always half a step off where he meant to be, and that half-step was always into one of Ciara’s angles.

Finn got back up off the column and went straight back in, close, so close he was inside Turiel’s reach. He took a hit to the ribs, then another to the leg, and kept going, because somebody had to keep Turiel’s hands busy.

Maeve stopped trying to keep everybody up. She watched for whoever was about to die and put just enough into them to keep them on the right side of the line, and no more.

Ciara emptied herself. She set her last planes behind Turiel and beside him, walls in his back, forcing him forward every time he tried to step away, toward James.

Alice took the worst of it.

She caught Turiel’s right wing at the root, wrapped herself round it and locked it against her body. When he started tearing at her to get it back, she did not let go. Black feathers came off her in handfuls. She did not let go, because the root of that wing was where four of his remaining red routes ran together, and James needed to reach it.

James reached it.

The scythe went through the first route.

Then the next.

Every cut made the red brighter somewhere else in Turiel. James could see it now, actually see it. The crimson in his chest and in his other wing was getting brighter and denser, packing up. There was too much of it for the routes he had left. It was going in faster than it could get out.

*It’s working.*

Turiel saw it at the same moment.

James saw his face change.

Turiel stopped caring about the raid.

He tore his wing out of Alice’s grip, and it cost him. Feathers and blood went across the floor, and Alice went down on one knee with her arms empty. He went straight through Ciara’s last plane, which shattered into nothing. Finn hit him in the back with both axes and he did not even turn. Cillian’s lightning cracked off his knee and he walked through it.

He was not fighting tactically any more. He was not a judge. Whatever he had once been, all that was left of it now was one debt. There was one debt that mattered more than everything else in the world, and nothing else counted.

James could not outrun that, and he did not try.

He held his ground, close, with the scythe up. If there was one more opening, one more route to cut, he wanted to be near enough to take it.

Turiel reached him first.

There was no red in it and nothing clever. Turiel came in under the scythe, put one hand flat on James’s chest, and drove the other through him.

It was an execution. It was meant for him and for what he carried, and nobody watching could have mistaken it for anything else.

James’s HP went to zero.

`[CHALLENGER JAMES GANNER HAS DIED]`

---

`[CONTRACT HOLDER DECEASED]`

Alice’s body reacted before anyone understood why.

Her wings went thin. James’s eyes were still open and he saw it from the floor, without seeing it. The black feathers along the edges of her wings started coming apart into ash. Her outline flickered, the way the undead had flickered in the throne room before they fell. The bond between them was coming loose. The contract holder was dead, and what he held went with him.

But it did not finish.

There was no black water and no shore. Nobody stood by the water to meet him.

He had crossed this line once already.

Behind his body, before the System had finished resolving his death, the broken eclipse came.

It came violently, as though something had been waiting just behind the air. A ring of black, cracked along its arc, tore open over his head, and silver-black light poured out of the crack and cut across the red light of the hall.

The scythe turned in his dead hand.

Death caught him faster this time.

`[AZRAEL’S BROKEN SCYTHE — AUTHORITY FRAGMENT RESPONDING]`

`[DEATH AUTHORITY MANIFESTATION: PARTIAL]`

`[JAMES GANNER — HP: 1/2,048]`

Alice’s dissolution stopped halfway.

The ash that had started to come off her wings pulled back in. The feathers settled into place. The bond between them went tight again, and she stood there, solid, with one hand pressed flat against her own chest. Half a second more, James thought later. Half a second more, and she would have been gone.

He came back.

It was not like the first time. The first time he had woken up into it and had to discover it, piece by piece. Now he knew what this was the moment it touched him. The world came back cold and very precise. He could feel every dying thing in the room. He could feel Finn’s ribs, and Declan’s mana guttering, and the four bodies on the floor that were not dying any more because they had finished.

He could feel Turiel too.

Turiel had taken a step back.

For the first time in the whole fight, the composure broke on his face. It did not slip. It broke, like a plate.

He had passed sentence. He had carried it out with his own hand. And the debt was standing up in front of him and refusing to stay paid.

Nothing in Turiel could stand that.

He came again at once.

But killing James had cost him. It had cost him the time it took, and it had cost him his position. Alice was on him again from the left, with her wings back. Finn was on the right, bleeding and still swinging. And all the Wrath Turiel had stored was trapped behind the routes James had already cut. James could see it, bright and packed and with almost nowhere left to go.

There was nothing new in the last exchange. Everything they had was something they had already shown.

Ciara found one more plane from somewhere. It was thin and weak, barely there. She set it at Turiel’s hip and turned him half a step.

Cillian put the last useful lightning he had into the leg Turiel needed to take that half-step back.

Declan held every curse he had left, his whole body shaking with it.

Finn got an axe hooked over one wing and hung on it, so that it could not close.

Alice took the other one.

James went straight through the opening they had made.

He did not go for the heart.

He went for the last route.

It ran along the inside of Turiel’s left wing root, down into his side. It was the last thick, intact braid of red in him, the one that every other route had been feeding into as James cut them, the only way out the Wrath had left.

Azrael’s scythe went through it.

The change was immediate.

All of it, every piece of damage the raid had put into Turiel since he came down off the platform, and everything the dead demons had fed him, had nowhere left to go.

The crimson stopped flowing outward under his skin. It began backing up. James watched it go back up his arms the wrong way, toward his chest. Across the floor of the tribunal hall the channels flared, and the light ran toward him now, not away. His wings seized. They locked open and rigid, with the red packing into them until the feathers stood out.

The Authority that had been built round giving pain back to everyone else had nowhere to send it, and it was trapped inside its owner.

Turiel tried to force it out. James saw him try, saw the strain go through his whole body.

Nothing came out.

James did not give him another chance.

He drove the scythe in under Turiel’s ribs and up, and Alice and Finn and the others held him, and he pushed it all the way through.

Turiel died carrying his own Wrath.

---

There was no explosion.

The crimson simply lost its direction.

The channels nearest Turiel went dark first. Then the ones beyond them went, and the ones beyond those, spreading out from him across the floor of the hall in a slow ring of going out. The light ran away down every channel to the walls, until the hall was lit only by the last thin glow in Maeve’s hands and the silver-black light round James.

`[TURIEL — FALLEN ANGEL OF WRATH — DEFEATED]`

`[FLOOR 40 CLEARED]`

`[STORY FLOOR COMPLETE]`

James stood at 1 HP with the scythe still in his hands.

Nobody cheered.

He looked for Alice first, because the last thing he had seen before the eclipse was her coming apart.

She was there. She was standing a few metres off with her wings folded, solid, breathing slowly. She did not need to breathe, but she did it from habit. Her eyes were on him and did not move.

Neither of them said anything. Neither of them had an explanation. He did not know why Death had come faster this time, and he was not going to stand there pretending he did.

Then the manifestation began to draw back.

The cold went out of his hands. The eclipse thinned behind him. The precise, terrible awareness of everything dying in the room faded down to ordinary sight.

That was when he saw the room the way a survivor sees it, and not as a problem.

Darragh lay by the platform steps, on his shield arm.

Mara was by the ice wall she had not finished.

Ren lay on his side, with his blade back in its scabbard.

Ciara stood beside Declan. They were the only two left of the five who had walked into Floor 39 together. Maeve was on her knees, her hands in her lap, and the light in them was nearly gone. Cillian had nothing left to cast, and he was just standing there with his arms at his sides. Finn was upright only because the head of his axe was on the floor and he was leaning on it.

James looked at Ronan last.

Ronan lay where he had stood, between where Turiel had been and where James had been, with the remains of his shield still strapped to the arm that had broken.

The System hung over all of it, over four bodies.

`[FLOOR 40 CLEARED]`

Nobody said anything.