Chapter 354 - 345 — The Man on the Wall III (Bonus)
The six Sentries took eleven minutes and did not do anything clever, which James was grateful for.
Finn and Ronan took the centre of the hall together and worked them one at a time, because six things in full harness across forty metres of open floor could not be hurried. Cillian dealt with the two that tried to come round through the side passages on the left, which he could see coming for ninety metres.
Maeve moved everybody twice — once to put a pillar between Ronan and a side mouth, and once forward, because standing still in the middle of a hall with nine unexplored openings in it was worse than advancing.
James got his board up at the four-minute mark.
`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]` ×2
`[MANA: 2,980 / 3,100]`
`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +60]`
`[MANA: 3,040 / 3,100]`
`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×3`
`[MANA: 2,800 / 3,100]`
Three skeletons in full harness, which was the best material he had ever been handed, and he did not send one of them at anything. He put them in the mouths of three side passages and left them there, so that the rest of the hall could be fought in without anybody having to watch nine holes at once.
`[THRONE SENTRIES SLAIN ×6]`
`[EXP GAINED: 3,240]`
`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 7,305 / 78,000]`
`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +90]`
`[MANA: 2,890 / 3,100]`
The hall went quiet.
The Steward had not moved.
---
They advanced.
Eighty metres, in formation, with James pulling the skeletons in behind them as they went and the platform getting bigger, and nobody said anything for about ninety seconds because there was nothing to say.
At thirty metres from the foot of the platform stair, the Steward lifted his right hand off the arm of the chair.
He did not stand. He did not speak. He raised his hand about fifteen centimetres and turned it over, palm up, and put it back down.
The floor between Team Zero and the platform opened.
---
They came up out of it the way Fossor came up out of ground, except there were a great many of them and they came up all at once.
They were short. That was the first surprise — waist-height on James, hunched, with long arms and bandy legs and a forward-thrusting jaw, and a pair of horns coming straight up out of the skull about the length of a hand. Dull red skin, all of them, in filthy strips of hide with bits of stolen metal laced onto it.
They had weapons and the weapons were terrible. Cleavers, broken spear shafts, one with a chair leg.
`[PIT RUNNER]`
`[LEVEL: 55]`
`[HP: 4,800 / 4,800]`
Nine of them, and they came screaming.
And eleven metres behind them, where the floor had also opened, something bigger came up and stayed where it was.
It was the same species and about twice the size — chest-high on Ronan, heavier through the shoulders, with the horns curling instead of straight and a mass of bones and small skulls tied into a rope around its neck. It had a staff in one hand with something wrapped round the head of it.
It did not come forward.
`[PIT SHAMAN]`
`[LEVEL: 60]`
`[HP: 13,200 / 13,200]`
---
"Small ones, front," said Maeve. "Big one’s at the back and it’s not moving. Ronan—"
"Front."
James sent all three skeletons straight into the Runners, which was the correct decision for about forty seconds.
They were bad fighters. Genuinely bad — no discipline at all, no spacing, throwing themselves at whatever was closest, and three armoured skeletons in a line accounted for four of them in under a minute while Finn and Ronan took the centre and Cillian shot two off the left.
`[PIT RUNNERS SLAIN ×6]`
"That’s easy," said Cillian. "Why is that easy?"
Then the Shaman lifted its staff.
---
It did not attack anybody.
It pointed the staff at a body — one of the ones Finn had killed thirty seconds earlier, lying on the flags about nine metres in front of it — and something came off the end of the staff that James did not get a good look at.
And the Pit Runner got up.
Not reanimated. Not raised. James knew exactly what raising something looked like and this was not it — there was no six seconds, no drift, no reorganisation. The thing on the floor simply closed the wound Finn had put in it, rolled over, stood up and came at them screaming with the same broken cleaver in the same hand.
"*What.*"
"It put it back," said Ronan.
"It put it *back*—"
The Shaman pointed at another one.
---
James stopped fighting for about four seconds and did the sum.
Nine Runners at four thousand eight hundred each was already a lot of work for a thing they gained nothing from. Nine Runners that got up again, indefinitely, while a thirteen-thousand-hit-point support unit stood eleven metres behind them and spent nothing it appeared to notice, was not a fight at all.
It was a mana drain with teeth. He could stand in this hall until his own board was gone and every point of mana he had was gone and there would still be nine of them.
"Stop killing the small ones," he said.
"*What?*"
"Stop *killing* them. Cillian, get off the Runners. Everybody off the Runners." He was already moving his skeletons. "It’s got four of them between it and us and it will not move. That’s the target. Nothing else in this hall is the target."
Finn did not argue.
---
The skeletons did not go at the Shaman, because three armoured skeletons could not cross eleven metres of Runners and they were worth more than that.
James put them into the four guarding it.
Not to kill them — to *hold* them, to get hands on them and take hold and be in the way, which is a thing a dead man in full harness does extremely well and a thing a screaming waist-high creature with a chair leg cannot solve.
`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×2`
`[MANA: 2,670 / 3,100]`
Five of them in the middle of it.
And with the guards occupied and the Runners still coming at Ronan and being turned rather than killed, Cillian finally had ninety metres of hall and a stationary target.
`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]`
`[PIT SHAMAN — HP: 13,200 → 9,800]`
The Shaman took it and stayed where it was and pointed the staff at another body.
"*Again.*"
`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]` ×2
`[PIT SHAMAN — HP: 9,800 → 7,600]`
And Finn went through the gap.
He crossed eleven metres past two of his own skeletons and a Runner that was busy being held by the throat, took a cleaver across the thigh doing it, and put both axes into the thing’s chest.
`[FINN HALE — BERSERKER DRIVE]`
`[PIT SHAMAN — HP: 7,600 → 2,400]`
It swung the staff at him. He took that on a haft and killed it.
`[PIT SHAMAN — HP: 2,400 → 0]`
`[PIT SHAMAN SLAIN]`
`[EXP GAINED: 900]`
---
The Runners did not get up again after that.
It took ninety seconds to finish the rest of them and none of it was interesting, and when the last one went down it stayed down, and nothing pointed a staff at anything.
`[PIT RUNNERS SLAIN ×9]`
`[EXP GAINED: 4,140]`
`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 12,345 / 78,000]`
`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +120]`
`[MANA: 2,790 / 3,100]`
James put his hand on the nearest Sentry corpse — not a Runner; the Runners were four foot tall and he was not putting a four-foot skeleton anywhere — and rebuilt.
`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×3`
`[MANA: 2,550 / 3,100]`
"Right," said Finn, with blood coming through his trouser leg. "So that’s what this is."
"That’s what this is," said James.
Thirty metres away, up five metres of platform, the Steward put his right hand on the arm of the chair and lifted it again.
---
The floor opened in a different place.
Further out — forty metres wide, across the full width of the hall in a line — and what came up out of it came up slowly.
They were dead.
Not undead in the way James used the word. *Dead*, and dried — men, or things that had been men, with the skin gone brown and tight over the bone and the eye sockets empty, in the remains of the same harness the Sentries had been wearing. They came up out of the flags and stood there and did not scream, and the silence of them after nine Pit Runners was appalling.
Eleven of those, across the front.
`[HUSK SOLDIER]`
`[LEVEL: 57]`
`[HP: 6,400 / 6,400]`
Behind them, five more, thinner, with nothing on but rags and no weapons at all. Each one had both hands up.
`[BONE CHANTER]`
`[LEVEL: 58]`
`[HP: 5,200 / 5,200]`
And behind those, at the back, two enormous ones — three metres, bulky, wrapped from the crown of the head to the ankles in layer on layer of blackened cloth, moving as though the cloth were the only thing holding them together.
`[SHROUDED DEAD]`
`[LEVEL: 62]`
`[HP: 15,800 / 15,800]`
---
James looked at all of it and felt something in his chest that he did not immediately like.
They were dead.
Every single thing that had just come up out of that floor was a corpse, and he was a necromancer, and for about a second and a half he let himself think the obvious thought.
Then he put it away, because he knew his own class better than that.
Reanimate worked on a corpse. A corpse was a thing that was not doing anything. Every one of those had come up under somebody else’s instruction and was standing there being run by somebody else — the same way his own were, the same way nothing on this earth could take one of his skeletons off him by wanting to.
*They’re not corpses. They’re already somebody’s.*
He had no idea whether there was a version of this where that changed. He had never in his life tried to take something off another caster and he was not going to find out at thirty metres with a thirteen-thousand-point support unit dead at his feet and two more waves behind whatever came next.
"They’re not mine," he said. "Nobody wait for me to do something clever."
---
"Chanters at the back have their hands up," said Maeve, very fast. "The big two are behind everything. That’s the same shape as the last one — the front rank isn’t the problem, the *back* is—"
The Bone Chanters fired.
There was no wind-up that anybody caught. Five of them, together, and what came down the hall was not lightning and not fire — it was a thin hard sleet of something pale that crossed sixty metres in less than a second and went *through* things.
James got behind the fourth pillar on the left with about a third of a second to spare and felt two of them go through the stone beside his shoulder and out the other side.
Finn went flat behind the plinth of the fifth pillar. Ronan got the shield up over Maeve and took four of them on it and his whole arm went down.
`[SUMMONED UNIT DESTROYED] ×2`
Two of James’s three new skeletons came apart in the open where he had left them.
"*COVER*," Maeve was shouting. "Pillars, everybody — Cillian, *don’t*, don’t lean out, they’re—"
A second volley came down and took a hand-sized piece out of the leading edge of the pillar James was behind.
---
And through the sound of it, the eleven Husk Soldiers began to walk.
They did not charge. They came up the hall at a steady walking pace, shoulder to shoulder across forty metres, with the Chanters behind them and the two Shrouded Dead behind those, and every third or fourth second the sleet came down the hall again and made it impossible to be anywhere except behind stone.
James looked left along the line of pillars and counted the distance to the next one.
Eleven metres of open floor.
"Maeve."
"I know."
"They’re going to be on us in about forty seconds and we can’t come out from behind these."
"I *know*," said Maeve.