Chapter 104 - 102 — No Detours I
**POV: Jace**
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> **[Random deployment commencing.]**
The hall went out and the cold came in on the same breath.
My right boot came down on stone with water sitting on it and went out from under me about fifteen centimetres before the sole caught.
I put my left hand flat against a wall and stopped there with my weight on it.
The wall was rough under the palm, cut stone with the mortar gone soft between the courses, and it was wet enough that my glove came away dark.
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I had come down at the top of a road.
It ran downhill between two rows of squat houses, narrow enough that a cart would have had to be careful, paved in flat grey slabs with moss packed into every joint until the joints were wider than they should have been.
Two of the roofs on the left had fallen inward. One of them had taken the front wall with it and there was a room open to the sky with a bed frame still standing in the corner of it.
Ten metres down on the right, a cart lay over on one wheel beside a well, and the other wheel was in three pieces around it.
Dark grass had come up through the cracks in front of every doorway on that street, in thick tufts, undisturbed.
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Mist sat between the buildings at about waist height and did not move.
It smelled of wet earth first, then of old timber going soft, and underneath both of those there was standing water somewhere close with nothing running through it.
The air was several degrees colder than the staging district and it got into the cut sleeves of my shirt immediately.
Somewhere a long way below and to the left, something heavy came down and the sound arrived about a second afterward.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 100.]**
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I looked at my hands.
The plates lay flat across the backs of both, overlapping the way they are supposed to overlap, with no gap anywhere along the wrist join.
I closed the right fist and the leather took my palm and did not slide.
Then I put a small amount through them and the channels came up even, both hands, all the way out to the first knuckles, and went down again clean.
The ring sat under the plate on the third finger, and when I closed the hand I could feel the band press against the finger beside it.
I went into the first house.
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The roof had come down at the back and taken half the floor above with it, and there were rafters lying across the room at an angle with the ends of them still up on the wall.
I went over two of them and under the third.
There was a cupboard against the far wall with both doors on it. It held four plates, a folded cloth stiff with damp, and a jar with nothing in it.
The chest under the window had a lid that came up and a hinge that came off in my hand. Blankets, gone black at the folds.
A shelf with a boot on it. One boot.
I gave it about forty seconds and went back out.
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The second building was bigger.
Two storeys, with a wide door that had been made for carrying things through, and shutters on the upper windows that had warped so badly they no longer met in the middle.
Inside, two of the three long tables were over on their sides.
The dust on the floor had a layer of grit in it and a path through the middle where somebody had walked, recently enough that the edges of the prints were still sharp.
A cupboard at the back stood open with both doors swung all the way to the wall.
And a piece of low-grade shoulder armour lay by the foot of the stairs where it had been dropped rather than put down.
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I went through what was left of it in about three minutes.
There was a torso piece on the upper floor, in a crate somebody had opened and not emptied. Light. Layered hide with thin metal strips run through it vertically, front and back, and four buckles down the left side.
I put it over the shirt and did the buckles.
It sat off my collarbones and finished above the hips, and when I rolled both shoulders forward it did not catch anywhere.
The weight of it came onto my ribs and stayed there instead of hanging off my neck, which is the whole difference between armour you can fight in and armour you carry.
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Under the crate there was a squat glass bottle with a cork driven into it, and beside it a second bottle, narrower, with something pale blue in it that had not settled.
The blue one is a mana restorative. I have never used one and I have read about them.
There was a pouch on a shelf with a flap and a single strap, and I took that as well and put both bottles in it and pulled the strap tight across my back.
I was fastening the last of it when something landed on the roof.
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The whole ceiling took the impact.
Tiles moved above me with a long scraping sound, three or four of them at once, and dust came down through the boards in fine straight lines.
Then a second impact, further along, travelling toward the front of the building.
I looked up.
Then the boards over my head came apart in the middle and something came through them.
It hit the floor four metres in front of me and the whole room shook and pieces of tile went out across the boards in every direction.
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It was a wolf that somebody had built wrong.
Shoulder height on it came up past my sternum, and the shoulders themselves were the wrong shape, heavier and further forward than they should have been, so that the front of it was carrying most of the animal.
The fur was dark and wet and hung in clumps that had stuck together and dried and got wet again.
Three pale lines ran across the muzzle from the left eye down to the jaw, old ones, with no hair growing back through them.
Its mouth was open and the teeth in it were yellow and there was saliva strung between the upper and lower on one side, moving when the head moved.
> **[Warg — Level 12.]**
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It came before the last of the tiles had stopped moving.
Not a run. It threw itself, the whole animal off the back legs at once, and the head came at my chest with the jaws already open.
I did not use anything. I got my hip round and went off the line with my left foot and felt the air of it go past my ribs.
The jaws closed on nothing about twenty centimetres behind me and made a sound like a door.
Then its weight went into the table behind me and the table stopped being a table.
> **[Ability Activated: Androphagos.]**
>
> **[Duration: 01:00.]**
And it was in the room with me properly.
Not the noise of it and not the shape of it. The exact place where the living part of it was, and the direction that place was going, arriving in my head continuously without my eyes being involved at all.
It came off the wreck of the table and round to my right along the wall, and I knew it was going right before its shoulder had finished turning, and I was already moving the other way.
Except the other way had a staircase in it.
I got two steps and my back came against the newel post and there was nothing behind me but stairs.
It came in again and I could not go backward, so I went into it.
I got the left gauntlet under the jaw as it arrived and pushed up and out rather than trying to hold it.
The head went past my shoulder instead of into my throat, and its breath came across the side of my face wet and hot with meat in it.
The near foreleg came through while the head was still going and the claws went across my chest.
> **[Health: 420/420 → 401/420.]**
The armour took it.
I felt every one of them arrive through the hide and the metal strips underneath, four separate places along my ribs, hard enough that the whole plate shifted against me and I lost most of a breath.
Nothing opened. That is the difference. Without that crate on the upper floor those four lines are in me and I am fighting a Warg with my chest laid open.
It went past and turned at the wall.
I came off the newel post and got into the middle of the floor where I had room on three sides, and it dropped its head and came a third time.
Straight. Committed.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**