Chapter 51: Stoneform Granite

Chapter 51: Chapter 51: Stoneform Granite

The dead came from both directions at once.

They climbed out of the black water in the chamber in rusted ranks, swords dragging, shields lifting, a hundred visors burning cold blue. Down the passage behind, the ones from the alcoves waded forward in a slow, clanking line, water to their waists, filling the only way out.

And in the middle of it all, Garrick kept changing.

The granite didn’t stop at his skin. It rose out of the floor and climbed his legs the way his wall had climbed the doorway, layer on grinding layer. The straps of his armor snapped, and the stone-grey plates fell away into the water one by one, useless now. His shoulders spread. His arms swelled into columns. He backed through the broken doorway into the round chamber, where the ceiling rose high enough to hold him, and kept growing: two meters, three, until something nearly four meters tall stood waist-deep in black water, with a man’s face pressed into a boulder of a head.

Only the eyes were still his. They were looking at Elias.

Keen Observation fired on its own.

[Target: Garrick — Guild Master, Ironfang.]

[Rank: B (Peak).]

[Skill active: Stoneform — Granite Colossus.]

[Warning: Physical resistance extreme.]

"Well," Tobin said softly, tipping his head back. "That’s a big lad."

Elias didn’t answer. His mind was moving faster than his feet ever had, laying the room out like a map. The Lord on its dais. A hundred dead between it and the door. A four-meter wall of stone that wanted him dead more than it wanted to get out alive. A dozen living people, and one way out.

He split the family in the space of a breath.

"Aveline. Marcus. The Lord and the water. Keep them off us."

Aveline’s head turned sharply. "And you?"

"Garrick."

"Elias—"

"Go," he said. "Please."

For a heartbeat she held his eyes. Then she pressed her gauntlet to the center of her breastplate, over the place where her oath lived.

"Wherever I stand," she said, "it stands with you."

She turned and walked into the water toward the dais, shield up, white fire still licking along the edge of her sword.

Above them, in the burial alcove, Marcus thumbed his rifle’s safety off.

"No more being quiet, then," he said, and fired.

The shot was a thunderclap. It rolled off the arched ceiling and boomed away down the passage, and at the front of the rising ranks, a wight’s helmet came apart. The blue light behind its visor went out like a pinched candle.

"Tobin. Lena. With me."

Lena was already moving, but not toward Garrick. She took Tully by the collar, walked him three steps back down the passage, and handed him to Sato like a parcel.

"You," she told Sato. "The one with the shield. This boy is your patient now. Nothing touches him." She turned to Petra. "You’re a healer?"

Petra nodded, wide-eyed.

"Good. Then you’ll know what to do with that arm of his when it starts bleeding again."

Sato looked down at the boy. He looked at the dead wading up the passage toward them. Slowly, he raised his shield.

Lena came back to Elias, rolling up the sleeves of her borrowed white coat.

"Listen to me," she said, low and quick, the way he imagined she’d once given orders over an operating table. "Whatever that is, it’s a skill. It lives in him. I can take it out."

"Then—"

"Not while he’s swinging. He has to be down. Still. And I need my hand flat on his chest for three seconds."

"Three seconds."

"Three. Not two and a half." Her eyes went up to the giant. "Get him on his back, Elias. I’ll do the rest."

In the chamber, Garrick laughed. It sounded like a quarry collapsing.

"You were a porter, Pierce," he said, and his voice came grinding out of a mouth of stone. "You carry things." He raised one enormous fist. "Come and carry this."

He stepped forward, and the black water jumped.

Stone

Elias went low.

Quick Step threw him across the water in a flat blur, under the sweep of that first fist, and he came up behind Garrick’s right leg with his knife already moving. He’d picked the spot on the way in: the back of the knee, where any armor had to bend, where any body did.

The blade hit stone and screamed.

Sparks jumped. The edge skidded sideways across the granite as if he’d tried to stab a cliff face, and the shock ran up his arm into his shoulder hard enough to numb his fingers. When he pulled the knife back, there was a notch in the cheap pawnshop steel the size of his thumbnail.

There wasn’t a mark on Garrick.

On the other side, Tobin came in with both cleavers. He didn’t hack. Elias had watched him take apart a Mine Wyrm, and he did the same thing now: read the body, found the joint, and put both blades into the hollow of Garrick’s elbow, one-two, like a butcher dividing a shoulder.

The first cleaver rang off. The second bit a finger’s width deep into the crease of the stone.

Then the stone moved. It ground shut around the blade, and Elias watched fresh granite seep up out of the floor, through Garrick’s feet and up his legs, and fill the crack from the inside. The cleaver popped out of the healed joint and splashed into the water.

"He’s feeding from the floor," Tobin called. He scooped the cleaver up without taking his eyes off the giant. "Like a root drinking. Every cut we make, the room fills it back in."

Garrick backhanded at him. Tobin ducked, but the edge of the fist clipped his shoulder and sent him skidding three meters through the water.

A number flickered at the corner of Elias’s vision.

[MP: 16.]

Four summons out was a weight on his chest, and the weight cost. Every Quick Step bit into it too. He’d never let the number get this low before. He didn’t know exactly what happened at zero, and he did not want to find out in here.

Tobin was back on his feet, digging one-handed in his apron pocket. He came up with something dark and twisted, like a strip of bark, and flicked it across the water.

"Chew," he said. "Don’t swallow it whole."

Elias caught it and bit down. It tasted like smoke and iron and something that had once been very, very angry. Heat went down his throat and spread through his chest like a coal.

[Beast Cuisine: Wyrm-Heart Jerky. Strength increased. Duration: 5 minutes.]

He put the knife away.

When Garrick’s fist came again, Elias didn’t dodge it. He stepped inside it, set his feet in the black water the way Aveline had drilled into him in the Sanctum, a thousand times, until his body did it without asking, and drove his right fist into the center of Garrick’s chest with everything the jerky and his own Strength could give him.

Something cracked.

Not just his knuckles, though those split open. A thin white line ran across the granite under his fist, as long as his hand.

Garrick looked down at it. For the first time, something moved behind his eyes that wasn’t contempt.

Elias drew his fist back to hit the same spot again. His knuckles were already bleeding. He didn’t care. One more, he thought. One more, and the line becomes a hole.

Then a shield hit Elias from the left like a car door.

Rourke. He’d waded in behind his guild master, and now he planted himself against Garrick’s flank with his heavy shield locked against the giant’s stone leg, the tattoos on his neck standing out with the strain.

"Rourke," Elias gasped, dragging himself up out of the water. "He walled me in too. One day it’ll be you on the wrong side of the door."

"Maybe," Rourke said. "Not today."

Tobin stepped between them with both cleavers raised. "Then today, lad," he said mildly, "you’ll be dealing with me."

Rourke swung the shield at him like a slamming door. Tobin didn’t block it. He hooked the rim with the back of one cleaver, the way he’d lift a pot off the fire by its handle, and pulled. Rourke staggered sideways off Garrick’s leg, cursing, and Tobin planted himself in the gap with both blades held low.

"Mind the floor, lad," he said. "It’s slippery."

At the doorway, a bowstring sang.

Vance hadn’t aimed at Elias. He’d aimed at the small white light at the bend in the passage. At the phone. At the evidence. Elias saw the arrow leave the string and knew he couldn’t reach it.

It was flying straight at Dex’s face.

And Dex, holding the phone up in both shaking hands, didn’t duck. He didn’t even close his eyes.

He just kept recording.