Chapter 315 - 306 — Hold Until Zero I
There were people in the building at ten to nine.
James came up the back stairs and there was a queue at the coffee machine on the second-floor landing, four of them, and one was a screener he knew by sight and three of them were wearing lanyards that had been printed on Friday. Somebody had put a laminated sheet on the wall of the briefing room that said INTAKE 01 — ORIENTATION with a fortnight of dates under it.
One of them stepped out of his way and said "Morning, Mr Ganner," and James said morning back, and kept going, and that was the whole of it.
Nobody needed him.
---
Maeve had the strategy room set up and did not look at him when she asked.
"Did you spend them?"
"No."
"James."
"I know."
"Fifteen. You’ve had ten since Floor 27 and you got five more off thirty." She turned round. "That’s most of a level sitting in a box."
"I know exactly what it is." James dropped into a chair. "Here’s the thing though. Every time I’ve nearly done it, I’ve been guessing what the next floor wants. I put them in Intelligence, that’s another few hundred mana and it does nothing about a Heavy standing on Ronan. I put them in Endurance, and then I’m somewhere I have to cast for an hour." He shrugged. "We’ve had three floors that were all one thing. I want to see what this one actually asks me for."
Maeve looked at him for a second.
"That’s not a bad answer," she admitted.
"Don’t sound so shocked."
"After thirty-one, though."
"After thirty-one."
---
`[TEAM ZERO — PARTY CONFIRMED]`
`[JAMES GANNER — FINN HALE — MAEVE CALLAHAN — RONAN CLEARY — CILLIAN WARD]`
`[CHALLENGERS: 5 / 5]`
`[REANIMATED — ACTIVE]`
`[ANATHEMA — BOUND — MANIFEST]`
`[LIVE BROADCAST ACTIVE — REGION: IRELAND]`
The chat came up already mid-argument.
**[FloorTheoryIE]:** SIX WEEKS. six weeks and not one word about wrath
**[ZeroFan]:** JAMES ANSWER THE QUESTION
**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** he’s not going to answer the question
**[GalwayGoblin]:** they’d have said if they knew. that’s the scary bit
James read one line of it and confirmed entry.
`[FLOOR 31 ACCESS CONFIRMED]`
---
They came out inside a fort that had lost most of its walls.
It sat on a low rise with open dirt running away from it in every direction — dry, packed, brown, cut about with old ditches and the stumps of palisade posts. The outer wall was three-quarters gone. What was left of it stood in long broken teeth with wide gaps between them, and there had been watch platforms once, and now there were two heaps and one that was leaning.
In the middle was a stone compound. Squat, thick-walled, a single storey with a flat roof, and four separate ways into it: a broken main gate on the east, a narrow gap where the north wall had come down, a low collapsed section on the south side you could climb, and a proper archway on the west that had a door hanging off it.
`[FLOOR 31]`
`[FLOOR CLASSIFICATION: STANDARD]`
`[MISSION TYPE: SURVIVAL]`
`[OBJECTIVE: DEFEND THE CENTRAL SANCTUM]`
`[SURVIVE UNTIL TIMER EXPIRES]`
`[TIME REMAINING: 60:00]`
`[FAILURE CONDITION: ALL REGISTERED CHALLENGERS LEAVE THE SANCTUM / PARTY ELIMINATION]`
"Oh, thank God," said Cillian. "It’s just a thing. It’s a normal thing with a normal timer."
"Don’t," said Ronan.
Finn was already walking the compound with Maeve, pointing.
"East gate’s the wide one, that’s yours. North gap’s narrow, one man holds that, that’s me until it isn’t. South’s a climb, they’ll come up it slow and in ones." He turned. "Cillian, the roof — you’ve got east and south off the same corner."
"Working."
"Maeve, middle. You’ll see all four."
"I’ll see all four."
James was not looking at any of the four.
He was looking at the ground outside the wall. Dry packed dirt, forty metres of it in every direction before the ditches started, no stone under it that he could see.
He knelt and put his palm flat on it.
`[UNEARTH ACTIVATED]`
`[FOSSOR SUMMONED]`
The dirt six feet to his left broke upward.
It did not open like a hole. It came up in a heap, one heave of it, and then the ground split and something came out through the split — big, and low, and moving the way a thing moves when the ground is not really an obstacle to it. Soil ran off its back in sheets and made a wide dark ring on the packed dirt around it.
Ronan took one step backwards without appearing to decide to.
"That’s the—"
"Yeah."
"You’ve had that since—"
"I’ve never had a floor that wanted it," said James.
He put his hand out toward the broken outer wall.
"Go round. Outside. Don’t come up. When something moves out there, tell me which side."
Fossor turned, and went down.
It did not dig. That was the thing James had never got used to. It went into the ground the way a hand goes into water, and the dirt closed over the top of it, and it was gone — and about a second later James felt it, a small steady pressure at the back of his skull like the skeleton thread but heavier and further away, sliding out under the eastern ditch.
**[GalwayGoblin]:** WHAT WAS THAT
**[CorkClimber]:** THAT IS NOT A SKELETON
**[ZeroFan]:** it went into the GROUND
**[user88317]:** HE HAD ANOTHER ONE?? SINCE WHEN
**[FloorTheoryIE]:** that’s not a skeleton and it’s not Alice. that’s a third thing.
**[MOD]:** Slow mode enabled.
James ignored all of it.
Ninety seconds later the pressure at the back of his skull swung hard to the right and started moving fast.
He turned east before there was anything to see.
"East."
---
`[REAVER]`
`[LEVEL: 48]`
`[HP: 7,600 / 7,600]`
They came over the eastern ditch in a loose mass, thirty or so, long-limbed and stooped and fast over open ground, and they made no noise at all until they were about sixty metres out and then all of them made noise at once.
They did not reach the wall in the shape they started in.
Fossor came up under the front of them.
James did not send it into the middle to fight, because it was not a skeleton and he was not going to spend it like one. He put it up under the leading rank, once, and the ground there simply stopped being ground — six or seven of them went off their feet and the twenty behind had to break around the collapse, and a mass that had been thirty wide arrived at the east gate as two uneven halves.
Ronan was standing in the middle of the gate with the shield planted when the first half got there.
"*Come on*, then."
Finn worked off his right and killed everything that Ronan turned sideways, which was most of them, because Ronan turned everything sideways.
Cillian waited. He let the second half funnel into the same gate behind the first, watched them compress, and then put a lance down the length of the packed column from the roof.
`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]`
Maeve called the four that had gone wide for the collapsed south wall, and Alice went over there and dealt with them in about eleven seconds without appearing to hurry at any point.
James stayed off Ronan’s left shoulder and did not try to fight anything on his own. He put Necro Blast into the ones Finn had already opened.
`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA] ×2`
`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +150]`
`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×2`
`[MANA: 2,970 / 3,100]`
He put both skeletons behind Ronan rather than sending them anywhere. There was going to be an hour of this and he was not going to spend the first wave being clever.
`[REAVERS SLAIN ×6 — EXP GAINED: 2,040]`
`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 29,685 / 72,000]`
The wave was finished in under four minutes and nobody had a scratch on them.
Finn came back up the gate wiping an axe.
"Well, that was—"
`[TIME REMAINING: 51:42]`
Everybody looked at it.
"Ah," said Cillian.
That was the first proper thing James understood about Floor 31. The Reavers were not the problem. Six of them had died in the gate without touching anybody. There would be more, and then more, and the thing they actually had to beat was the number in the corner of everybody’s vision going down at one second per second for the next fifty-one minutes.
---
Fossor found the second wave from two directions at once.
James felt the pressure split — not literally, it could only be in one place, but it moved east and then swung north fast enough that he understood what it had run into on the way.
"Two. East and north."
"How long?"
"Half a minute."
Ronan stayed on the east. Finn took the north gap, which was narrow enough for one man and which meant the man had to be very good.
Alice started toward Finn.
"*No* — far wall," Maeve snapped. "South, they’re already on the south, Alice, *south*—"
Alice changed direction in the air and went south, and eight seconds later there were things coming up the collapsed section that would have been in the compound if she had gone to Finn.
James split the board.
Two skeletons to Finn’s gap, because Finn on his own in a narrow space needed something to stand behind him and not die. One stayed with Ronan. One walked with James, four metres behind his shoulder, doing nothing at all, which was the entire reason it existed.
And Fossor stayed outside. James did not bring it in. It moved under the ground from the east approach to the north one, and he could feel where it was the whole time, and that was worth more than anything it could have done with its hands.
`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×3`
---
Something got through the broken masonry beside Finn.
James felt it before he saw it — the wrongness in where Fossor was and where the pressure at the north gap suddenly wasn’t — and turned in time to see a Reaver come through a gap in the wall six metres behind Finn’s back.
The skeleton he had put there was on the far side.
`[GRAVE STEP — 120 MANA]`
The world went black and cold and came back eleven metres away, and James arrived facing about thirty degrees off where he needed to be, with the floor tilting under him and no idea where the end of his own sword was.
The Reaver hit him.
It caught him across the ribs before he had his balance, hard enough to put him into the wall, and it hurt, and there was a second where he could not do anything about it at all.
Then his eyes caught up.
He got Durendal into the thing’s chest on the backswing of its second attempt and blew the rest of it apart at contact range.
`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`
`[REAVER SLAIN]`
`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +30]`
Finn had not even turned round.
"You alright?"
"Grand."
"You always take one on the way in."
"I *know*."
---
The second wave took eleven minutes and cost them.
Cillian’s breathing had changed by the end of it. Ronan came off the east gate shaking his shield arm out and rolling the wrist. Finn had a shallow cut on the outside of his knee that he had not noticed happening.
James checked his mana properly instead of assuming.
`[MANA: 2,700 / 3,100]`
Four hundred down in nineteen minutes. Every kill fed him thirty and every skeleton cost him eighty, and he had raised five of them, and that arithmetic had only ever gone one direction.
"Forty-one minutes," said Maeve, the words left hanging.
No one answered her.