Chapter 316 - 307 — Hold Until Zero II
The third wave brought something bigger with it.
`[HEAVY REAVER]`
`[LEVEL: 52]`
`[HP: 16,400 / 16,400]`
It came through the east gate ahead of everything else and hit Ronan’s shield and moved him.
Not a step. Ronan went back a metre and a half with both boots ploughing, and his heel found the inside edge of the gate before he stopped, and it was the first time all day that anything had done that to him.
Finn came off the north gap immediately.
Which meant the north gap was empty, and eleven Reavers found that out within about four seconds, and Maeve’s voice went up an octave calling it.
James did not send Fossor at the small ones.
He waited.
He waited while the Heavy wound up on Ronan again, while its whole weight went forward onto the front leg, and then he put Fossor up underneath that leg.
The ground under the Heavy dropped a foot.
It did not fall. It lost its base — the charge went out of it, its shoulder came round wrong, and instead of absorbing sixteen thousand hit points of momentum on a shield Ronan simply turned it and let the whole thing stumble past him into the gatepost.
Finn hit the hip joint on the way past.
`[HEAVY REAVER — HP: 16,400 → 13,100]`
`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]`
She had held it for eleven minutes and spent it there, on a joint Finn had already opened, which was the only place it was worth anything.
`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`
`[HEAVY REAVER — HP: 13,100 → 9,400]`
Finn again, twice, on the brand.
`[HEAVY REAVER — HP: 9,400 → 4,700]`
Ronan put the shield edge into its throat and held it against the gatepost while Finn took the head off it.
`[HEAVY REAVER SLAIN]`
`[EXP GAINED: 720]`
Forty metres away, on the south wall, Alice killed the other one on her own in about six seconds and then stood on the parapet looking mildly put out that it had taken six.
Nobody said anything about the difference. There was nothing to say. She was what she was, and there were four approaches and one of her.
---
By the halfway mark James had stopped being a man in a fight and started being a small industry.
That was the only way he could describe it afterward. The east gate had become a corpse pile a metre deep, and every time one of his skeletons came apart he raised its replacement out of the pile without moving his feet. He had six of them up. Two stood permanently in the north gap so Finn could leave it when he had to. One lived on the south climb. One walked behind James as a Grave Step anchor and never fought at all. Two rotated wherever Maeve said the pressure was.
And Fossor stayed under the ground outside the wall for twenty-two straight minutes, moving from approach to approach, so that James knew where the next wave was coming from before it cleared the ditch every single time.
He had not raised a single one of those skeletons before he arrived. The floor had provided all of it.
`[TIME REMAINING: 24:15]`
The middle twenty minutes went past in a way none of them could reconstruct properly later.
Ronan held the east gate and did not leave it once. Finn moved constantly — north gap, back to east, out to the south climb when it thinned, back to north. Cillian learned the shape of it and stopped firing at anything that was not funnelled, waiting every time until they were compressed in a gap before he spent anything real. Maeve kept all four sides fed and stopped Finn twice from chasing kills past the wall line.
Alice went wherever the whole thing was about to fall over, which happened four times.
`[REAVERS SLAIN ×14 — EXP GAINED: 4,760]`
`[HEAVY REAVERS SLAIN ×2 — EXP GAINED: 1,440]`
`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 40,685 / 72,000]`
`[MANA: 1,820 / 3,100]`
---
`[TIME REMAINING: 10:00]`
Every gate opened.
Not new gates. The floor did not invent anything — the ones already there simply all had things coming through them at once, from every approach, and the interval between waves stopped existing.
James pulled everything in.
"Fossor — *in*." He felt it turn under the eastern ditch and start back. "Skeletons to me. Tight. Nobody’s outside the compound line."
They collapsed the whole defence inward.
Ronan took the east gate, still, because it was the widest and because he was the only one who could stand in it. Finn stopped holding the north gap and stood four metres behind Ronan instead, close enough to rotate into whichever side went first. Maeve moved to the middle of the compound where she could physically touch any of them inside three seconds.
And Cillian came down off the roof.
He did not want to. He had the best firing angle on the floor up there and he gave it up anyway, because there were things coming up the south climb now and a man alone on a roof was a man alone.
Alice stayed outside the tight formation entirely, moving around the walls, because she was the only one of them who could be cut off and not die of it.
James stood in the middle of six skeletons with Fossor coming up under the compound floor.
---
The last ten minutes were the worst thing they had done since Caerleon, and it was not close.
A Heavy came through the east at a charge and James let it commit — let it get all the way to full weight, three strides out — before he brought Fossor up under it.
The floor of the gate collapsed. The Heavy went down onto one knee inside its own charge and Ronan, instead of taking it, stepped aside and turned it into the gatepost for the second time that hour.
`[FINN HALE — BERSERKER DRIVE]`
Two skeletons went into the smaller things trying to use the moment Ronan’s attention was on the Heavy, and both of them came apart doing it, and neither of the Reavers got through.
`[SUMMONED UNIT DESTROYED] ×2`
Cillian burned something over the top of all of it.
`[TIME REMAINING: 04:18]`
James raised two replacements out of the pile at the gate without stepping back.
`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×2`
`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +90]`
`[MANA: 1,590 / 3,100]`
Down again. Always down.
---
At a minute out Maeve said "One minute," and James stopped conserving anything.
There was nothing to save it for. The number in the corner of his eye was going to hit zero whether he was empty or not, and being empty at zero was not a problem.
`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`
He put it into the chest of a Heavy that was three feet from getting past Ronan’s shoulder and the thing went down onto its face.
Fossor came up under a group of six coming round the west archway and broke the whole advance into a heap of things trying to stand up, and Alice crossed forty metres and went through them while they were still on the ground.
`[00:30]`
`[00:20]`
Ronan’s shield had a split in the rim you could get two fingers into.
`[00:10]`
One got through.
It came between Ronan and Finn while both of them were committed to different things and it went straight down the middle of the compound at the only person in it who could not stop it.
James had a skeleton eight metres behind it.
`[GRAVE STEP — 120 MANA]`
`[00:06]`
He arrived badly. He had gone fast and he had not chosen the angle and the world came back tilted with his weight on the wrong foot, and the Reaver was already turning into him.
It swung first.
James got the flat of Durendal up in front of it and did not so much block it as be somewhere it was not quite, and the impact went up his arm and put him back a step.
`[00:04]`
Maeve did not stand there waiting to be saved. She was already moving — sideways, away from both of them, putting a pillar of the compound between herself and the thing.
James’s feet found the floor.
`[00:03]`
Fossor came up out of the compound floor directly behind the Reaver and took its back leg out from under it.
`[00:02]`
The thing went down onto one knee facing the wrong way and James put Durendal through the base of its skull.
`[HOSTILE SLAIN]`
`[00:01]`
There were still nine of them inside the walls.
`[00:00]`
`[SURVIVAL OBJECTIVE COMPLETE]`
`[FLOOR 31 CLEARED]`
---
Nobody stopped.
That was the part James remembered. The panel was up and the floor was over and Ronan was still behind the shield with his weight forward, and Finn had one axe above his shoulder waiting for something, and Cillian’s hand was full of white light he had not thrown yet, and Maeve was halfway through the word *south*.
James was standing over a corpse with his sword still up.
And Fossor was half out of the ground beside him with the dirt still sliding off its shoulders, unmoving, waiting for the next thing.
It took about three seconds for any of them to believe it.
Cillian’s hand went out first. The light went off it and up into the air and dissolved.
Then the Reavers still inside the compound stopped being anywhere, the way things did, and the fort was quiet, and there was nothing in it that wanted to kill anybody.
Ronan sat down on the gate step with the shield across his knees.
---
**[ZeroFan]:** THEY HELD AN HOUR
**[GalwayGoblin]:** AN HOUR. SIXTY MINUTES.
**[CorkClimber]:** IT CAME UP UNDER THE BIG ONE. AGAIN. HE DID IT AGAIN AT THE END
**[FinnsLeftAxe]:** everyone shut up about alice for one second, WHAT IS THE DIGGING ONE
**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** he had that the whole time?? he’s had that the whole TIME??
**[FloorTheoryIE]:** it never fought. watch it back. it never fought once. it broke the ground and left.
**[user88317]:** NECROMANCER WITH A MOLE. WE ARE COOKED
**[MOD]:** Slow mode enabled.
For once it was not about Alice, and James, sitting down on a broken wall with his hands shaking slightly, found that he did not mind.
---
`[FLOOR 31 CLEAR REWARD]`
`[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 7,200]`
`[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 36,000 PER MEMBER]`
`[JAMES GANNER — LEVEL: 43]`
`[EXP: 53,065 / 72,000]`
`[MANA: 1,440 / 3,100]`
`[FLOOR MVP — RONAN CLEARY]`
`[REASON: EAST APPROACH HELD — 60:00 / 60:00]`
"He never left the gate," said Finn, before anybody could argue. "Sixty minutes. Not once."
Ronan did not look up from the split in his shield rim.
"Second one this year," said Cillian. "You’re becoming a personality."
---
James stood up and looked across the fort.
Six skeletons were still standing exactly where he had put them, at the gate and the north gap and the south climb, waiting on a battlefield with nothing left on it. The corpse pile at the east gate had given him most of them.
Fossor had come the rest of the way out and was sitting in a wide ring of turned earth beside him with dirt still coming off it in slow falls, after fifty-eight minutes underneath a floor.
Alice came over the wall and landed inside the compound and folded her wings.
And James looked at the ground.
There was no red in it.
No thin line under a flagstone, no seam glowing up through the dirt, nothing that came out of a body and went looking for a crack. The dirt was dirt. Sixty minutes of things dying on it and not one thread of anything had come up out of the floor.
He had not realised he was going to check until he was already doing it.
`[FLOOR 32 AVAILABLE]`
Three floors in a row, the Tower had handed them something they could not name.
This one had handed them a fort, an hour, and a number counting down.
That was all it had been. And they had held it.