Chapter 105 - 103 — No Detours II
The heat came up around both fists and the light with it, and the room went from grey to gold and every broken thing in it threw a shadow.
I had its line in my head before it was halfway to me.
I stepped off it, one pace left, and let the shoulder go past my hip, and I put the right hand into the side of its neck under the jaw with everything I had behind it.
The fur went first and I heard it go.
It ran another two metres on legs that were not being told anything and went down into the floorboards, and one board came up at the far end and stood on its edge.
> **[Mana: 260/260 → 252/260.]**
> **[Warg eliminated.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 60.]**
>
> **[EXP: 375/1,200 → 435/1,200.]**
---
Sixty. Five times its level, and it was at mine.
I put two fingers under the front edge of the torso piece and pulled it back off my chest to look.
Four grooves across the hide, the deepest one about halfway through the layers, and one of the metal strips underneath had a bright scrape along it and a slight bend.
It would take another one. It would not take three.
I left the Warg where it was, because nothing came off it, and I went back through the storehouse once at speed and took nothing else worth the weight.
Then I went out.
---
The street had changed while I was inside.
Something came down a long way below, heavy enough that I felt it come up through the paving into my heels about half a second after I heard it.
Then a flash, downhill and to the left, white, out of the gap between two buildings. It lit the mist from inside for perhaps a third of a second and made a solid shape of it.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 97.]**
Three gone in about six minutes.
I went down the street. Not toward the flash and not away from it.
---
The man came out of a doorway on my right and he did not say anything at all.
I got the first fifteen centimetres of the movement out of the corner of my eye and nothing else, and there was a spear point already inside my reach with a man’s whole weight behind it.
I got the right gauntlet across and hit the shaft rather than the head, and it went off line by about a hand’s width and kept going, and the point opened my left sleeve from the elbow to halfway down the forearm.
> **[Health: 401/420 → 389/420.]**
He was young. Younger than me, possibly.
Mismatched gear, a leather body under a metal chest section that had been made for somebody with a wider frame, and a narrow helmet that came down over both temples and left the whole middle of his face open.
Both hands were locked on the shaft about a third of the way up. He had done that before.
He did not stop to look at what he had done. He pulled the spear back through his own grip and put it in again at my stomach before I had finished turning.
I gave ground because there was nothing else available.
That is the problem with a spear and it is the whole of the problem. He had about two metres on me and every one of those metres belonged to him.
He kept the point moving between my chest and my hips so that I could not decide where to be, and he did not lunge properly again, because he did not have to. He only had to keep me at the end of it.
I went left along the front of the houses to see what he did about it.
He turned with me and put the butt of the shaft against his hip and shortened his grip about ten centimetres, which is what you do when you know you are being walked toward a wall.
So he was not going to give me the wall.
The street was open on my left and open behind me and there was one thing on it that was not.
Two houses down, a doorway had collapsed and left a stub of wall standing out into the road about a metre and a half, with the broken corner of it at shoulder height.
I went for that instead of for him.
He came after me and he came fast, and I got behind the stub and the spear came round the outside of it and the shaft grated hard along the stone with a noise that went up my back teeth.
He could not bring it through. He had to take it back out and come round.
I stayed on my side and moved when he moved and made him do that twice more, and the second time I heard him change how he was breathing.
He stopped trying to reach round.
He came out into the open two metres back from the corner and set his feet and waited for me to leave it, which was the correct decision, and which put both of his feet in one place at the same time.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
I came off the corner and the street stopped being two metres.
It is not a jump. The ground goes underneath and I am still on it, and the whole distance happens and I am present for all of it, and the only part that does not fit inside a second is the stopping.
He got the point halfway round.
I came in past it with my right shoulder low and the shaft went across my back somewhere above the pouch, and then my landing foot had to take everything that had gone into the start of it.
The ankle took it and the knee took most of what was left and my hip did the rest.
Then I was inside two metres and the spear was a length of wood he was holding in the wrong place.
He knew it in about a quarter of a second, which is faster than most people, and he let go with the front hand and swung the shaft at the side of my head with the back one.
I took it on the shoulder and the top of the arm and it was worse than I expected.
> **[Health: 389/420 → 366/420.]**
He got his back hand off it and reached across for something at his belt.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
The gold came up between us and I saw the whole of his face inside that helmet for about half a second.
I put the left hand into his ribs under the metal section where the leather was on its own, and he folded round it, and the second one went in under the jaw while he was still folding.
> **[Mana: 252/260 → 246/260.]**
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
The strike stopped. I felt it stop, through the gauntlet, three centimetres inside where it should have kept going, against nothing at all.
His head came back and his eyes were open and there was no blood anywhere on him.
Then he went into light, from the middle outward, and the shape of him lasted about a second after the man had gone.
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
>
> **[Level 10.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 100.]**
>
> **[EXP: 435/1,200 → 535/1,200.]**
> **[Challengers Remaining: 94.]**
---
A hundred.
Sixty for a Warg at my own level, and a hundred for a man at Level Ten.
That is ten times his instead of five times his, which means the Tower pays double for a person, and it pays on what they were and not on what I am.
I stood on the wet stones and did that once and then let it go, because ninety-four was three fewer than the counter had said before he attacked me, and only one of those was mine.
---
His things were on the paving where he had been standing.
The spear went over sideways and rolled about a quarter turn and stopped against the kerb.
Beside it, a squat glass bottle with a cork in it, sitting upright in the wet where it had come down, and a hardened leather bracer with a metal strip let into the outside face, lying open with the straps out flat.
I took the bottle. I put the bracer on my left forearm over the opened sleeve and pulled both straps through, and it went on cold and stiff and I did not care.
I left the spear.
Then I went down the street.