Chapter 54: The Barrow Lord

Chapter 54: Chapter 54: The Barrow Lord

The Barrow Lord leaned on its sword.

It didn’t swing again. It didn’t need to. It simply put its weight on the blade, slowly, the way a man leans on a door he means to close, and the weight came down through Elias’s crossed arms like a building settling onto his shoulders.

His knees bent. His heels skidded backward through the water and bumped against Tully.

A fourth crack ran across the granite on his left forearm, then a fifth. Flakes of stone broke loose and pattered into the water like hail. Stoneform was level one. It had been his for less than a minute, and it was the only thing between a sword the length of a knight and the boy behind him.

"Tully," he said through his teeth. "Move."

"I can’t—you’re—"

"Move."

A hand closed on the back of Tully’s collar. Sato dragged the boy backward through the doorway on his rear, splashing, and Petra caught him at the other end.

The sword pressed lower. Elias’s elbows started to give.

[Stoneform (Lv. 1): Integrity 31%.]

Then Kill Zone Link flickered across his vision, and a seam lit up on the Lord’s sword arm: a thin red line circling the wrist, where an iron gauntlet had been fused, badly, to the shields of the forearm.

"Wrist," Marcus said. "Somebody."

Tobin was already there.

He’d come across the chamber without a sound, which Elias would wonder about later, because Tobin was not a quiet man. He planted one boot on the Lord’s knee, climbed it like a kitchen stool, and brought both cleavers down on the glowing line at once.

The first cut bit. The second went through.

Iron split with a shriek. The gauntlet lurched sideways on the wrist, the grip slipped, and the weight on Elias’s arms halved in an instant. He shoved upward with everything he had left. The great sword slid off his granite forearms and buried itself in the floor beside the doorway, throwing up a wall of black water.

Elias fell backward into the shallows by the step.

The stone on his arms crumbled away in grey flakes, leaving the skin underneath red and raw and shaking. But it was whole.

"Got you, lad," Tobin said, dropping down beside him. He hauled Elias up by the collar with one hand. "Can you stand?"

"Ask me again in a minute."

The Barrow Lord tore its sword free of the floor and flexed its broken wrist. The blue fire in its visor burned brighter.

"All right," Marcus said. "Everybody look."

Kill Zone Link opened wide.

It had never done this before, not like this. Elias felt it go out from the alcove like a net thrown over the whole chamber, catching him, Aveline, Tobin and Lena all at once, and pulling their sight together into one picture. In that picture, the Barrow Lord lit up like a city at night.

There were seams everywhere, hundreds of them. Every shield fused into its armor had its own glowing outline, and where the rust had eaten deepest, the lines burned brightest. Its knees. Its broken wrist. The plate Aveline had already split on its left shoulder. And in the center of its chest, under a crest of six overlapping shields, one small, hard point of light, pulsing slowly, like a heart.

"Core," Marcus said. "Behind the crest. Six plates deep. It isn’t getting any thinner while we stare at it."

"Then we take the plates off," Aveline said.

She came up out of the water where the dead had been dragging at her, the fire low on her blade now but still burning, and set herself in front of the Lord.

What followed was the closest thing to a dance Elias had ever seen in a gate.

The Lord swung at Aveline. She took it on her shield, the blow fed the oath, and the oath fed the fire. Tobin went in under the swing and took a plate off the back of its knee with three fast chops, like someone jointing a bird. The Lord turned on him, Marcus’s rifle cracked, a rivet in its crest burst, and a shield fell away into the water with a sound like a dropped pan. The Lord turned again. Aveline was there.

Swing. Block. Cut. Shot. A plate fell. Then another.

Behind them, the dead rose out of the water to defend their king and closed in from every side.

At the doorway, a bowstring sang, then sang again, and the two nearest wights went down with arrows through their visors.

Elias looked back. Vance stood in the broken doorway beside Sato, nocking another arrow, his face pale and furious.

"Don’t look at me," Vance snapped. "Just kill the damn thing so we can leave."

[MP: 6.]

The dead were winning.

Not against Aveline. Against time. For every wight Vance dropped at the doorway, two more climbed out of the water. They dragged at Tobin’s legs. They hammered at Aveline’s back. Elias, still half-crouched on the step with his arms shaking, watched the markers in the Link multiply faster than the family could cut them down, and watched his mana tick toward the bottom.

Lena watched them too.

"They’re not alive," she said beside him. She was staring at the Lord with the same look she’d given Garrick: a surgeon’s look, searching for the place to cut. "They don’t move on their own. Something’s running through all of them, out of it. Like threads on a puppet. I can see where they’re tied off."

Elias looked at her. "Can you take it?"

"Same rules. It has to be down. And still."

"Aveline," Elias called. "Can you hold it still?"

Aveline didn’t answer in words. On the Lord’s next swing, she didn’t block. She let the sword glance off her pauldron, stepped inside it, and drove her burning blade straight down through the Lord’s right foot, through the iron of its boot and into the stone floor beneath, all the way to the crossguard.

The Lord roared and wrenched at its leg. The sword held. The fire in it blazed white as Aveline leaned her whole weight on the hilt.

"Still enough?" she said.

Lena was already moving.

Tobin linked his hands into a step and boosted her up, then turned, hooked both cleavers over the Lord’s free arm, and hung off it with all his weight. Lena went up the fused-shield armor like a ladder, gripping rivets, bad hip and all. She reached the broken crest, braced her knee against a jutting rim, and laid her palm flat over the pulsing light.

One. Two. Three.

She pulled.

What came out of the Lord wasn’t stone. It was a tangle of thin blue threads, hundreds of them, glowing cold, snapping loose one by one from the dead all over the chamber as she drew them out of its chest.

[Extract and Graft: Extraction complete.]

[Skill removed: Barrow Command. Target: The Barrow Lord.]

All across the chamber, a hundred wights stopped mid-swing, mid-step, mid-climb, and dropped into the water like puppets with their strings cut.

Lena held the knot of blue threads up in front of her face for a moment. Then she closed her fist on it, and it went out like a pinched wick.

"Some things," she said, "don’t deserve a new home."

The Barrow Lord was alone.

It stood pinned through the foot, one arm dragged down by a cook, its crest broken open. For the first time since it had risen from its throne, it looked small.

"Elias," Marcus said quietly. "Two plates left. Your shot."

[MP: 3.]

Elias stood up.

His ribs screamed. His left arm was still half numb. He reached down for the cold, heavy weight behind his ribs, and grey crept back over his right fist, thin and patchy. It would hold for one punch. Maybe.

One punch was all he needed.

Quick Step took him across the water and up onto Aveline’s braced shoulder, which she lowered for him without being asked, and from there onto the Lord’s broken crest beside Lena. Through the Link, the core blazed under the last two plates, close enough that he could feel its cold.

He drew back his stone fist and drove it into the center of the light.

The first plate shattered. The second bent inward with a shriek of old iron and split. The granite on his hand cracked from knuckle to wrist and fell away, but his bare fist kept going, through the gap, into a cold so deep it burned, and closed around something hard and round and pulsing.

He pulled it out.

The blue fire in the Barrow Lord’s visor flickered. Dimmed. Went out.

The Lord didn’t fall so much as come apart. The fused shields slid off one another in a long, clattering avalanche, a hundred armies’ crests tumbling into the black water, until nothing was left but a heap of rusted iron with Aveline’s sword standing upright in the middle of it.

Elias landed on his knees in the water with the core in his fist.

Then the XP hit.

[The Barrow Lord (A-, Irregular) has been slain.]

[Level up: 15 → 16.]

[Level up: 16 → 17.]

[Level up: 17 → 18.]

[Level up: 18 → 19.]

[Level up: 19 → 20.]

[New summon slot unlocked. Summon slots: 4 / 5.]

[Gate collapse in 5:00.]

Heat poured through his limbs and his broken ribs, and when it ebbed, he was still breathing.

The chamber had gone quiet. Aveline pulled her sword out of the iron. Tobin lowered his cleavers. Marcus climbed down from his alcove, and Lena sat on the edge of the heap with one hand on her hip, looking tired and very satisfied.

At the doorway, Dex finally lowered his phone.

"Got it," he said hoarsely. "Got all of it."

And in the shallows beside the broken pillar, a man who used to be stone was crying.