Chapter 106 - 104 — No Detours III
> **[First Battlefield Contraction commencing in 05:00.]**
The map came up over the left of my vision and drew the active region on itself.
I was outside it, north and high, with the whole of the settlement between me and the edge.
Five minutes and about eleven hundred metres, downhill, on a road. That is a walk with time left over, and the only way to make that number a problem is to stop moving for four of the five.
I went out through the bottom of the village.
---
The houses gave out inside a hundred metres and the road kept going.
Wet grass on both sides of it, long, lying flat in patches where the water sat under it, with sections of old wall running out into the field and stopping.
The mist thinned as the ground dropped and I could see a long way for the first time since I had arrived.
And about six hundred metres ahead the ground opened into a ravine, and there was something across it.
---
An aqueduct.
Pale stone, much paler than anything in that village, gone grey and streaked black in vertical bands under every joint where sixty years of water had come out of the channel and down the outside.
Nine arches that I could count from where I was, and two of them were not there any more, so the line of it broke in the middle and started again on the far side.
The upper channel had lost most of its cover. I could see the trough of it open to the sky along the last three spans.
Underneath, the ravine went down about twenty metres into stones and standing water, and the drop under the broken section had nothing across it at all.
---
There were buildings at both ends.
Low storage sheds clustered around the near footing, four or five of them, flat-roofed and half fallen. At the far end, something square with slit windows that had been built to watch the crossing.
The road I was on went straight to it.
Of course it did. It is a road and that is a crossing, and there are only so many ways down into that region, and every one of them is in Rev. 41 with a note beside it.
I was not going to be the only person on it.
---
I heard them before the road got there.
Metal on stone first, twice, flat and hard.
Then a scream that started and stopped inside about a second and a half, which is the sound a person makes when the thing that was going to happen to them happens faster than they expected.
Then something went off against the second support from the near end and the fragments came off it in a spray and went down into the ravine, and I heard them arrive at the bottom four or five seconds later.
I got down behind the last section of broken wall and looked before I went any further.
---
There were people all over it.
Two of them at the storage sheds on my side, a big man in a scaled hauberk with a mace and a woman with a long knife in each hand, and they had been at it long enough that both of them were moving badly.
On the far left, a stairway ran up the side of the near footing and had lost about a third of its treads.
There was a man at the top of it with a bow he had no room to use properly, throwing things down at somebody trying to come up.
Two more came along the approach together, one behind the other, and stayed together, which told me they had made an arrangement in the deployment hall and it had survived.
And somebody was going the other way.
A man with his left arm held against his body was moving out along the near edge of the ravine, away from all of it, not fast, checking behind him every six or seven paces.
He had worked out that the contraction was going to close on this crossing and he wanted to be somewhere else when it did.
He was right and it was already too late for him, and that was not my problem.
---
> **[Challengers Remaining: 89.]**
I watched it for about twenty seconds and no longer.
Six fights and a hundred metres of open approach, and going into the middle of that is how a Level Twelve with eight Abilities gets taken off this floor by his fourth-best opponent.
But the big man in the hauberk had put the woman with the knives on the ground.
Not eliminated. She had gone down on one knee against the wall of the nearest shed with her left hand flat on the stones.
One of the knives was on the ground about two metres from her, and she was already pushing herself back up along the wall with her shoulder.
She got up and started round the corner of the building.
He went after her at a walk, because he did not need to run.
I moved.
---
I came out of the wall line and down the last forty metres of the road with my feet on the grass rather than the stone, and I was into the gap between the first two sheds before either of them had anything about me.
She came round the corner backward and saw me and her whole body went wrong.
She had been running from one man and there were two.
He came round the corner after her about a second and a half later, and by then I was already inside four metres of both of them, and he did what I would have done, which was stop looking at her entirely.
The mace came up and across at me while his feet were still turning.
I went under it and I did not go for him.
I went past him at her.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
She got the second knife up and I came round the outside of it and put the right hand through the guard into her chest.
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
>
> **[Level 11.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 110.]**
>
> **[EXP: 535/1,200 → 645/1,200.]**
> **[Mana: 246/260 → 240/260.]**
The light came out of the space between us and I was still moving through it when the mace arrived.
I did not see it. I heard the man’s boot go down on the stone behind my right heel and I turned my shoulder into the sound and it caught me across the top of the back and the side of the neck.
> **[Health: 366/420 → 318/420.]**
The whole right side of my head rang and my mouth filled up with the taste of a coin.
I went four steps forward because it put me there and got a hand on the wall of the shed and turned round.
He was already coming.
---
Something hit the shed from the other side hard enough to move it.
A whole section of the far wall came in about a foot and a shower of grit came off the roof, and there was a man shouting on the other side of it, one word, twice, and somebody else answering.
Then a piece of the aqueduct support came down somewhere behind him and the noise went right through the middle of everything.
> **[Ability Activated: Androphagos.]**
>
> **[Duration: 01:00.]**
Six metres opened around me and filled up.
Him, in front, close, coming. Two more behind the shed wall on my left, both moving, one of them going away from me and one of them not.
Somebody at the edge of it behind my right shoulder, at five and a half metres, holding still.
I have never had it that full. In the Tutorial it was one thing at a time in a street.
---
He was a great deal better than the boy with the spear.
He came in short and did not overcommit with the mace, and he kept the head of it low and made me guess, and when I moved off the line he moved with me instead of going past.
The scaled hauberk went down over his hips and moved when he did, and there was nothing about it I was going to get through with a three-second burst.
I went for the hands.
Twice, at the wrist above the grip, and the first one missed and the second one landed and did not do enough, and he pulled the mace back through and brought it up under my ribs on the left where the hide armour ended.
> **[Health: 318/420 → 291/420.]**
My feet went out.
The stones between the sheds had a skin of wet on them and something else underneath, and my left boot slid the full length of a paving slab and I came down onto my hip and my shoulder went into the aqueduct footing behind me.
The stone was cold enough through the back of the shirt to be a separate thing from the pain.
He was three metres away and closing and my thumb went inside the gauntlet and found the edge of the band on the third finger.
Then it went past it.
Because he was three metres away and coming in a straight line, and I had the whole of him in my head, and there was a piece of the broken support lying against the footing about half a metre from my right hand.
I got my hand on it and put it into his shin as he arrived.
It was not a clean strike and it did not have to be. His leading foot stopped and the rest of him did not.
The mace came down where my head had been about a fifth of a second after my head stopped being there.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
I came up off the ground inside the length of the weapon.
The heat came up between the hauberk and my own chest and I put the left hand under the arm where the scales stop, and then the right one into the same place.
He tried to bring the elbow down on the back of my neck and got most of it.
The third one went in under the jaw.
> **[Mana: 240/260 → 228/260.]**
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
>
> **[Level 13.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 130.]**
>
> **[EXP: 645/1,200 → 775/1,200.]**
---
> **[Challengers Remaining: 79.]**
I was on one knee against the footing with my hand still out where his chest had been.
Eighty-nine when I came down the road. Seventy-nine now.
Three of those ten were mine and the aqueduct had done the other seven while I was busy, and it had done them in about ninety seconds.
> **[First Battlefield Contraction initiated.]**
---
I got the cork out of the squat bottle with my teeth and drank it on my feet.
It went down cold and sat in my stomach and did nothing, and I did not wait for it, because I know exactly how long it does nothing for.
His mace was on the stones and I left it there.
But the woman had dropped a shoulder guard when she went down, articulated, three plates on a leather backing, and it went onto my right side over the hide in about eight seconds with one buckle and it was better than nothing on that shoulder.
Then the ten seconds finished and the whole of my back opened up from the inside and the ringing came out of my head.
> **[Health: 291/420 → 351/420.]**
---
And the crossing changed while I was standing on it.
The man with the bow came down off the broken stairway and did not go back to whoever he had been fighting. He went along the approach.
The pair who had arrived together broke apart and went past each other in opposite directions and one of them shouted something and the other did not answer.
The big fight behind the shed simply stopped. Two men came out from behind it about four metres apart, and neither of them turned round, and both of them started walking the same way.
That is what a contraction does and it does it to everybody at once.
Nobody on that crossing had decided anything. The ground had decided it, and the ground was going to keep deciding it every time the ring came in.
The man with the bad arm who had been trying to leave was coming back along the ravine edge toward all of it, because the map had told him the same thing it had told the rest of us.
---
I went out along the near footing to get onto the approach and that is when I saw him.
Three arches out on the crossing, on the flat ledge beside the open channel where the cover had gone.
Two of them were trying to put him off it.
---
He was a head taller than either.
Heavy through the chest and the shoulders in a way that does not come off a build, short dark hair grown longer on the top and tied back off his neck, and a plain dull cuirass with no clan mark cut into it anywhere.
There was a notch out of the top edge of his left ear, deep, the width of a finger.
The blade in his hands was long and single-edged and he was holding it low on his right side with the point back.
They came at him from opposite sides, which is correct, and they came at the same time, which is also correct.
He went at the left one first and he went early.
Not a step. He covered the ground before the man had finished setting his feet for the attack he had already started.
The blade came up from the low position on the right side and went across on a diagonal, and the man was inside a Floor Protection flash before his own weapon had reached the top of its arc.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 78.]**
The second one had two full seconds and did the best thing available to him, which was get his guard up and get backward toward the broken end.
He did not put a foot behind himself once.
He walked into the man’s guard and hit it three times in about a second and a half, all three in the same place, high on the left, and the third one went through and put the man on the ledge.
The blade came down once more.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 77.]**
---
He straightened up.
He was not out of breath. He rolled the wrist once to bring the point back down and let his shoulders come off the guard position and stood there.
Then he turned his head and looked out across the crossing and found me.
Ninety metres, through mist, with four separate fights and about thirty people moving between us.
Neither of us did anything.
He did not come and I did not go, because ninety metres of open crossing with a contraction running is not a place either of us was going to spend, and both of us knew it at the same time.
He looked at me for perhaps three seconds.
Then he turned and went the other way along the ledge, toward the near end and down.
---
The active region kept coming in on the map, from every side at once, and it did not care what any of us wanted.
Everyone still on that crossing was being pushed at the same ground and the ground was getting smaller.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 77.]**
I put two fingers through the strap on the right gauntlet and pulled it down one more hole, and made a fist, and felt the plates come in.
Then I started for the zone.
And a hundred metres to my left, coming off the far side of the crossing, so did he.u