Chapter 189 — A Taste of Death II
Alice froze.
Every part of her stopped at once, wings, legs, breath, because his fingers were closed around the root of the wing where the red-gold thread met her back, and there was only one reason to take hold of a wing there.
Then she fought like an animal.
She kicked against the rubble, thrashed her whole body against his arm, and the feathers along both wings snapped rigid and lashed back at him, dozens of black edges whipping at his face and chest. Every feather that touched the air around him came apart. They disintegrated in rings, ash bursting off her wings with each stroke, and his grip never moved.
James pulled.
The wing came out of her back.
It tore from the base, wet and heavy, the malformed bone and the red-gold tissue and the joint that had grown back wrong, all of it, and Alice’s scream went through the hall and up into the dark above the throne and hung there. James threw the wing aside. It hit the floor near the ruined statues and lay twitching.
Alice collapsed onto her side.
She began to crawl. There were no hands to crawl with, so she went on elbows and knees, and her one remaining wing beat against the marble, hauling her along the floor toward the throne in scraping lurches. Toward the throne, because it was hers, because there was nothing else left in the room that was.
James followed her.
He walked. The whole raid had spent an hour learning the length of Alice’s patience, twenty Challengers bleeding across every foot of this floor while she laughed at their best work, and now the room got to learn the length of his. Each footstep was unhurried. Ash from his wings drifted down behind him. She scraped and lurched and gained her four feet, and he covered it in two easy strides and let her gain it again.
Alice stopped crawling.
She twisted her head around, and her eyes went past him again, up, to the broken ring of black light shaking behind his head.
"Azrael," she gasped. "Stop him."
James stepped on her remaining wing and pinned it flat to the marble.
"He’s not the one doing this."
He turned the scythe in his hands and hooked the curve of the blade under the second wing joint. Alice hauled herself forward, elbows skidding in her own blood, and got nowhere, because his boot held the wing exactly where it was.
He drew the blade through the joint slowly.
Slowly enough that she felt the edge find the gap in the bone. Slowly enough that she understood every second of it, the way Declan had understood, the way Orla had understood.
The second wing came free.
Alice rolled onto her back beneath him, with no hands left and no wings, and her breath came in short, broken pieces. Behind her head, the black halo flickered, dimmed, and began to shed pieces of itself, thin dark flakes drifting sideways and going out, because holding a true form takes strength and she had none left to give it.
James stood over her.
He didn’t speak. His eyes left her face and moved across the hall instead. To Declan, face-down beside his dropped shield, the grey light long dead around him. To what was left of Orla, and the spear still lying where Alice had let it ring on the tiles. To the scattered plates of Camillia’s armor. To the ribs and vertebrae of his wolf, stopped three feet short of where James had fallen.
He looked at each of them for as long as each of them deserved, and then he looked back down at Alice.
Alice had followed his eyes the whole way around the room.
She understood why this wasn’t over quickly. He watched her understand it.
Then she spent the last thing she had.
The black silk tore off every wall of the throne room at once. It came apart midair into hundreds of blades, red-gold, edged, and they turned in the air like a school of fish and converged on James from every direction there was. Below him, the lying reflections in the marble reached upward, pale hands rising out of the tiles, closing around his ankles and calves to hold him for the swarm.
James rotated the scythe once in his hand.
A black ring left the blade and crossed the throne room in every direction at the same time, silent, passing through silk and stone and air without slowing.
Every blade stopped where it was. The red-gold light in them went out the way a filament goes out, and they dropped, all of them together, and what hit the floor was dead metal, ringing and rolling and lying still. The hands around his legs withered into dark stains on the tile. Behind Alice’s head, the last of the black halo split along its arc and fell apart.
Silence again.
James looked down at the scythe in his hands. He had turned it once. That was the entire cost. Somewhere behind his ribs, where his heartbeat used to live, he understood that he had just glimpsed the smallest edge of something with no floor under it, and that after tonight he would not be able to do this again, and part of him was glad of that in a way he didn’t examine.
"What are you?"
He looked back down. Alice was staring at him now. At him, his face, his eyes, and nothing behind him. Her voice had nothing left in it but the question.
James lowered the scythe until the inside of the curved blade rested against the skin beneath her chin.
"Still James."
He pulled it through.
Her head came away in one movement, and her body stopped, all of it, at once. The true form went with her. Red-gold light leaked out of every wound at the same time, dimmed to grey, turned black, and faded. Across the room her severed wings crumbled into the same black nothing, and the two hands lying by her fallen sword went with them, and then there was only a still shape on the broken floor that got smaller and simpler as the authority left it.
[FLOOR BOSS DEFEATED]
[FIRST DISCIPLE ALICE HAS BEEN SLAIN]
[FLOOR 20 CLEARED]
[RESTORING ALL SURVIVING CHALLENGERS]
Golden light came up out of the floor.
It rose through the whole hall at once, warm, ordinary System gold, and it went to work without asking anyone.
The seam in James’s chest closed the rest of the way and vanished. The torn mess across his back, where the wing frames had punched out through muscle and armor, knitted shut, and the deep grinding ache of it switched off like a lamp.
Across the room, Finn’s side sealed under his hand. The shaking in his legs stopped. The debt Redline had carved out of his body was paid in full, and he lay there for a moment flexing his fingers, not trusting it.
The light gathered at the end of Marcus’s stump and built. Bone, then flesh, then a hand, his hand, and Marcus opened and closed the new fingers once, twice, staring at them, then looked immediately across the floor at his son instead.
Maeve’s burns faded. Saoirse’s leg took her weight when she tried it. Down the hall, the handful of surviving Challengers from the outer lines climbed to their feet one by one as the gold moved through them.
The light passed over Declan and left him exactly as he was.
It passed over Orla the same way. It rose off the floor of the throne room and faded near the ceiling, and the dead stayed dead, every one of them, because the System restored Challengers and these were bodies now, and the System had never once pretended otherwise.
Maeve moved to Declan anyway. She knelt beside him and didn’t cast anything, because there was nothing to cast. She just stayed.
[JAMES GANNER — HP: 1/1,260 → 1,260/1,260]
Only when the restoration finished did the authority start to leave.
The broken eclipse behind James’s head fractured, quietly, into pieces of black light that thinned and went out. His wings shed their remaining feathers in a slow fall of ash, and then the bare bone frames grayed, crumbled, and poured away down his back as dust. The black veins in his neck and jaw pulled back under his skin like ink drawn out of water.
In his hands, the scythe changed last. The long ancient blade shortened. Cracks crossed the black metal, the smoke-and-cold-light curve unraveled, and what was left was the broken fragment Alice had snapped, jagged along its edge, familiar, his.
[AZRAEL’S BROKEN SCYTHE — AUTHORITY FRAGMENT RESEALED]
[DEATH AUTHORITY MANIFESTATION ENDED]
The strength went out of James like a tide going out.
The heartbeats around him faded first, then the cooling of the dead, then the hairline map of every crack in the marble, all the terrible information the authority had been pouring through him, gone, sense by sense, until the throne room was just a room again, seen through two ordinary eyes.
His own heartbeat came back. It thudded once against his ribs, then settled into rhythm, and he stood still through it with his hand pressed flat against his chest.
He did not fall.
He looked down at his hands. Ordinary hands. Then at the small dark shape that had been Alice, and at the empty floor where her wings had crumbled. He remembered all of it. Every step, every cut, the slow walk, the kitchen. The authority had moved through him, but every decision in the last five minutes had been his, and he stood there holding that.
"...James?"
Finn’s voice, from behind him. Careful. The voice of a man who has watched his best friend die, float, grow wings, and take a floor boss apart, and now needs to know what answers when he calls the name.
James turned around. Just turned, like anyone turning at their name.
"I’m fine."
Finn looked at him for a long moment. Then he let his head drop back against the marble and let out a breath he had been holding, one way or another, since the scythe went through James’s chest.
Marcus flexed his new hand once more and said nothing at all.
Maeve stayed where she was, beside Declan, her hand resting on the back of his armor.
Saoirse slid her last dagger into its sheath on the third try.
Nobody had asked anything yet. Nobody had crossed the floor to him. Every question in the room was still forming, all of them aimed at James, at the scythe, at the space behind his head where a black ring had been—
A chime sounded.
It rang through the throne room, and it rang in the ears of every Challenger in every Tower, in Dublin, in London, in Seoul and Lagos and São Paulo, on training floors and safe floors and gate queues, an interface tone that none of them had ever heard before, arriving everywhere on Earth at the same instant.
[WORLDWIDE ANNOUNCEMENT]
[WORLD-FIRST FLOOR 20 CLEAR ACHIEVED]