Chapter 108 - 106 — The Bottleneck II
I did not look down at what he left.
Because the man who had put him through that wall came through it after him, and he came at my left side while I was still turning.
I got about a third of him in the corner of my eye and moved on that.
The thing in his hands went across the front of my chest instead of into the side of it, and it took the top layer off the hide armour in a strip.
> **[Ability Activated: Androphagos.]**
>
> **[Duration: 01:00.]**
Six metres, and there were nine living things inside it.
Him, close, in front. Two at four metres behind the low wall on my right, moving, one of them going down while I registered it.
A pair at the outside edge crossing left to right and not stopping.
Somebody at five metres directly behind me, coming, and then turning off at four and going somewhere else.
I have never had to sort that many. In the storehouse it was one animal and a staircase.
---
He was heavier than the axeman and he was not wounded.
A long-hafted thing with a head on it that was more hammer than anything, both hands on it, and a plate harness that had been made as a set rather than assembled out of a Floor One crate.
He worked me back toward the wall with short strokes and did not overreach once, and the haft came up between us twice to take what I put in.
Two people crossed behind him at four metres and I knew it without looking and did not have to.
Then something came in from an entirely different fight and hit the wall about two metres to my left, and a piece of it went past my ear, and we both had to move for that.
He moved better than I did.
He came out of it with his feet already set and his off hand came flat onto the side of his own weapon, and the head of it went white along one edge for perhaps a third of a second.
Then he swung.
I got the gauntlets up and it did not matter what I got up.
It came through the plates and through the armour and into the whole left side of my chest at once, and my feet came off the ground, and I went into the low wall shoulder first with my back to it.
> **[Health: 314/420 → 246/420.]**
The air went out of me and did not come back for a long time.
I got a hand on the top of the wall and my legs took some of my weight and then stopped taking it, and I got down onto one knee with my mouth open and nothing going into it.
My left arm came up about halfway and would not go further, and there was something wrong under the armour on that side that moved when I breathed.
He was six metres out and he was bringing the weapon back up and his off hand was going flat on it again.
My right hand closed on the top of the wall and I felt the band come round against the finger beside it under the plate.
Then I let go of the wall.
> **[Ability Activated: Snare.]**
> **[Mana: 214/260 → 204/260.]**
His left boot stopped belonging to him.
Everything above the ankle kept coming, because that is all it does, and the rest of the man arrived over a foot that had been fixed to the stone about a fifth of a second earlier.
He went down onto that knee and the weapon came off line and went into the ground.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
I got off the wall and crossed the six metres and I did not do it fast, because I did not have fast in me.
I did it while he was still getting the foot free.
The first one went into the side of the helmet and did nothing useful. The second went in under the jaw where the harness stops and the third went into the same place.
> **[Mana: 204/260 → 196/260.]**
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
>
> **[Level 13.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 130.]**
>
> **[EXP: 885/1,200 → 1,015/1,200.]**
> **[Challengers Remaining: 70.]**
---
Seventy-four when the axeman landed in front of me.
Two of those four were mine and the crossing did the other two inside about ninety seconds, and it was going to keep doing that whether I fought anybody or not.
There was a squat glass bottle lying against the base of the wall where the axeman had gone down, upright, unbroken.
I took it and put it in the pouch and left everything else, including a very good hand axe.
Then I went for the road.
---
> **[First Battlefield Contraction: boundary approaching.]**
It came across the far end of the crossing while I was looking at it.
Not a wall and not a colour. The air over the last two arches went slightly wrong, the way heat goes over a road, and everything on the other side of it stayed perfectly visible and started to look as though it was somewhere else.
There were still people out there.
Most of them made it. Two came down the steps behind me at a full sprint with nothing left in their faces at all.
One did not.
---
He was about eighty metres out on the fifth arch when the boundary went over him.
He kept running. That is the part.
His stride went uneven inside about four paces, one leg shorter than the other, and then his shoulder dropped and he was running with his whole body turned about fifteen degrees off the direction he was going.
The armour on him went grey. All of it, from the outside in, in patches that joined up.
He got another thirty metres like that. Then his leading foot went down and did not come up and he went along the stone on his front, and he was still trying to get his hands under him when he went into light.
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
> **[Challengers Remaining: 68.]**
Nobody on the near footing watched it. I watched it because I had stopped for two seconds, and then I stopped stopping.
---
The narrow section is the last thirty metres before the steps and it was full.
I counted six of them in the immediate space and there was a seventh somewhere behind the parapet that I only knew about because of the noise.
Two were fighting on the ledge itself, side on, neither of them able to use half of what they had because of the drop.
One was trying to get past those two along the channel side and had a foot in the trough, in the black water, up to the shin.
Two more had come up onto the broken cover of the seventh arch, which is not a floor, and were finding that out.
And one man was going through all of it at a run with his weapon still on his back, taking the hits and not answering them, because he had decided the only thing that mattered was being on the other side.
---
He was the one who swung at me.
Not the runner. The one with his foot in the trough. He got it out as I came level and put a short sword at my head on the way past, one-handed, with no weight in it, entirely because I was there.
I took it on the forearm plate and turned into him.
He was Level Ten at the outside and he had already spent whatever he came onto that crossing with.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
Two seconds. One hand into the middle of him and the other under the jaw.
> **[Mana: 196/260 → 192/260.]**
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
>
> **[Level 10.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 100.]**
>
> **[EXP: 1,015/1,200 → 1,115/1,200.]**
The light was still coming off him when the next one used it.
Somebody had been waiting three metres up the ledge for exactly that, and he came in while my hands were still out, and he got a spear butt into the side of my knee and then a boot into the same place.
> **[Health: 246/420 → 231/420.]**
My leg went and I went down the parapet with my hand on it and got up on the other side of him, and he did not follow, because two other people arrived between us and he had to deal with them.
That is what that ledge was doing to everybody.
---
I got a metre of parapet at my back and made myself read it instead of fighting it.
Six people and one of them was already going to be somebody else’s.
The two on the broken cover had stopped fighting each other entirely and were both crouched, working out where the load-bearing part of it was.
The runner was through and gone.
The spear man had one in front of him and one coming round behind him and was not going to get both.
And on the ledge below the steps there was a man on one knee with his helmet off.
---
His helmet was off because he had taken something across the face and could not see out of it.
The man who had done it was already twelve metres away going up the steps and had decided not to spend the four seconds.
He had a war hammer across his knees that I could not have lifted properly a month ago, and he was getting his feet under him.
In about six seconds he was going to be a serious problem for whoever was nearest, and he was going to be it blind.
I was nearest.
I did not go across the open ledge at him, because he would hear that.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
The eleven metres went underneath me and I was on every centimetre of it.
He got his head round on the sound at about the halfway point and started to bring the hammer up off his knees.
The arrest went through my right ankle and up into the hip, and my leg took it and complained about it later.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
I came in under the hammer while the haft was still coming off his thigh.
The first hand went into the side of the neck and the second into the same place and he got the haft up crossways for the third one and I went round it.
> **[Mana: 192/260 → 184/260.]**
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
>
> **[Level 14.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 140.]**
>
> **[EXP: 1,115/1,200 → 1,255/1,200.]**
> **[Experience threshold reached.]**
I was already moving off the ledge when it went through me.
> **[Level increased.]**
>
> **[Level: 13.]**
>
> **[Strength: 32 → 33.]**
>
> **[Endurance: 42 → 43.]**
>
> **[Agility: 41 → 42.]**
>
> **[Perception: 27 → 28.]**
>
> **[Maximum Health: 420 → 430.]**
>
> **[Health: 231/430 → 241/430.]**
>
> **[Maximum Mana: 260 → 270.]**
>
> **[Mana: 184/270 → 194/270.]**
>
> **[Unassigned Attribute Points: 6 → 9.]**
>
> **[EXP: 55/1,300.]**
It came up through the soles of my boots and out through the top of my head and it took about a second and a half.
The breath I was in the middle of taking went further down than the one before it.
The ankle that had just taken a Talaria arrest stopped being the first thing I could feel.
And my left arm came up past where it had been stopping, not all the way, but past it.
That is all it does. Ten more Health than I had a second ago and ten more Mana, and it does not give me back the hundred and eighty-nine I have spent.
I put it away and kept going up the steps.