Chapter 97 — Gear Up III (Bonus)
She came at me before the light had finished going.
And she had changed.
Everything she did in the next thirty seconds was built around not planting anything. She stopped setting her feet before she struck.
She came at me off half-steps and passing weight, and twice she gave up an opening she could have taken because taking it would have meant standing still for a third of a second.
She had watched me take a man’s foot away from him and she had rewritten her entire fight around it in less time than it took him to disappear.
I could not do it to her. I tried once and put ten Mana into a boot that was already coming off the ground.
> **[Mana: 206/250 → 196/250.]**
---
It got faster after that and it got worse for me.
She was quicker than I was, in the ordinary way, without anything switched on. She opened the outside of my thigh and I did not see which hand did it.
> **[Health: 331/410 → 289/410.]**
I got my knee back under me and put my shoulder into the door frame and stopped her coming through it, and she went out through the gap in the roof end instead, into the open, where she had room.
Which was the mistake.
Because room is a thing I can take away.
---
She came round the corner of the building at nine metres and I planted my rear foot in the dirt.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
I crossed all of it and my eyes did not catch any of the middle.
The stop went up through my right ankle and into the hip the way it always does, and I came down about half a metre past where I wanted to be with my heel skidding, and I had to put a hand out.
It cost me nothing important, because the whole nine metres had gone somewhere she had not accounted for.
She had built the last thirty seconds around distance. She had been giving up openings to keep it.
I was inside it before her weight had finished moving.
---
She got one blade up and I took it on the shoulder piece and hit her in the sternum with the other gauntlet, and she went four metres and came down badly.
Then she ran.
I want to be accurate about what I did next, because it was arithmetic and not anything else.
She was eleven metres out and moving well for somebody who had just taken that. The contraction had four and a half minutes left on it. The place I was going was still a walk away and it was near the edge.
And a Player who is eleven metres behind you with two knives and a reason is a Player who is going to be nine metres behind you in a minute, and I could not have that at my back for the rest of the floor.
So I went after her, and it took eight seconds, and I did not enjoy any part of it.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 196/250 → 184/250.]**
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
>
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 70.]**
>
> **[EXP: 995/1,100 → 1,065/1,100.]**
>
> **[Challengers Remaining: 86.]**
---
Thirty-five short.
I looked at that number for about a second and a half and then went back for the equipment, because thirty-five EXP is not worth being caught in a contraction over.
---
Both of them had dropped everything they had picked up since deployment.
I went through it fast and took almost none of it.
His chest plate was better than mine. Newer, lighter, and it had proper articulation at the sides instead of two straps and an apology.
I took mine off in the open with my back to a wall, which is a thing that made the whole of my spine unhappy for the eleven seconds it took, and put his on.
It fitted.
Her shoulder pieces came as a pair and I took both, so the right side of me stopped being bare.
There were two more healing draughts between them. I took both and put all three inside the plate.
His weapon I left on the ground. Her blades I left on the ground.
And I kept the gauntlets, because there was nothing in either of those piles that was better and because I had just watched what they did to a man who thought his weapon was the answer.
---
Then I sat down on a fallen block for one minute, because my leg had started to matter.
The cut across the outside of the thigh was about eleven centimetres and it had been open the whole of the second half of that fight.
Blood had gone down inside the trouser leg to the boot and the fabric had gone stiff and dark and was sticking and unsticking every time I moved the knee.
There was a hot band up my left side where the plate edge had caught me, and the whole of that ribcage complained when I breathed all the way in.
My forearms still had no hair on them.
I got the cork out of one of the draughts with my teeth and drank it.
---
It was not instant.
It went down cold and sat in my stomach as a cold thing for about ten seconds, and I was starting to wonder whether it had been worth carrying, and then it arrived.
Not as relief. As a sort of pull, in the leg, deep, underneath the cut, as though something were being drawn together from the inside by a hand that did not care whether it hurt.
I put my head back and breathed through it.
By the time it finished, the leg had closed to a seam and the bleeding had stopped and the ribs were about half of what they had been.
> **[Health: 289/410 → 349/410.]**
Two left.
---
> **[Challengers Remaining: 84.]**
>
> **[Challengers Remaining: 83.]**
> **[First Battlefield Contraction initiated.]**
I felt it before I saw anything.
The air changed at the edge of everything, out at the limit of what I could see, and there was a line out there that had not been there, and it was coming inward.
Slowly. That is the thing nobody puts in the guides properly. It does not race.
It walks, at about the pace of a man not in a hurry, and it gives you time to make a decision and then it gives you time to regret it.
And the whole floor started to move.
---
Movement went past me at eight hundred metres, three people at a jog, going inward.
Fifteen minutes later, five more, further out, doing the same. Somebody’s fight started up ahead of them and stopped after about forty seconds.
That is what the contraction actually does. It does not kill anybody. It takes the ground away and puts a hundred people who were comfortably apart into a space where they can see each other, and then they do the rest of it themselves.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 81.]**
Everybody on that floor was going one way.
---
I went the other.
I passed two of them coming out as I went in, about four hundred metres apart, and neither of them so much as changed direction for me.
The second one actually looked at me for a full second, and then at the ground behind me, and then went back to running, and I could read the whole of it on him.
There is nothing over there.
The board says there is nothing over there. Rev. 41 says there is nothing over there. Sixty-three years of contributors, a third of them with a mark beside their names, all say there is nothing over there.
The line came in behind me while I walked.
---
The ground went up and then broke, and the broken part went down, and I came round the shoulder of it and stopped.
It was there.
Not a building. There was no roof and no wall and nothing that looked like anybody had made a decision about it. Just an opening in the rock at the bottom of a fall of scree, about two metres across, with the dark starting immediately.
Anybody walking past would have called it a hole. The man nine years ago had.
Then the wind changed and came out of it instead of going in, and it came up the scree into my face.
Cold. Very cold, and moving with intent, and carrying a sound out of the dark that was not water and was not stone settling.
It had a rhythm to it.
Something a long way down there was moving on a count.
I put my hand flat on the rock at the edge of the opening.
Cut. Not weathered, not split. The inside face had been worked, and there were tool marks on it under sixty-three years of nothing, and they went away into the dark in a line as far as the light reached.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 79.]**
I went in.