Chapter 109 - 107 — The Bottleneck III (Bonus)
> **[Challengers Remaining: 64.]**
I saw him once on the way up.
Off to the right, below the footing, in the gap between the two guard buildings, and I got about two seconds of it.
He had a man backed into the corner where the buildings meet and the man had a shield up and both feet set, and it did not matter.
The blade came down out of the low carry and went through the top edge of the shield and the man’s guard came apart, and the light was already coming out of him before the follow-through had finished.
Then somebody crossed in front of me and he was gone.
---
I did not look for him after that.
Ninety seconds later something went off down there hard enough to move the ground under the steps, and a section of the nearer guard building’s roof came in.
I did not need to look. Whatever was down there was still going forward.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 61.]**
---
The road at the top of the steps runs out of the ravine and up, and about two hundred metres along it the ground opens.
Old field walls, low, running out across a slope with grass between them. Room to be four hundred metres from the nearest person.
And people started to come apart the moment they had somewhere to go.
The pack that had come off that crossing behind me split three ways inside a minute. Fights that had been happening because two men could not avoid each other simply stopped happening.
I went off the road and got behind the thickest piece of wall I could find and put my back on it.
---
Then I looked at myself properly for the first time since the crossing.
The hide armour had a strip off the front where the hammer man’s first stroke had taken it, and under the left arm the whole panel had gone in.
Two of the metal strips inside it were bent and one of them had come through the hide from the inside and was sitting against my ribs.
I got the buckles open on that side and pulled it off me and looked.
The shirt underneath was wet and dark from the bottom of the ribcage to the hip and it had gone stiff further down where it had already dried once.
When I breathed all the way in, something moved on that side that should not have been moving, and the noise I made was not one I decided on.
---
I got the cork out with my teeth and drank the whole bottle.
It went down cold, and sat there, and did nothing, and I counted, because that is how long it does nothing for.
*One.*
*Two.*
Two men went past on the road forty metres below me, one behind the other, not running.
*Six.*
*Seven.*
The mist had thinned right out on this side and I could see the aqueduct behind me end to end, and the boundary sitting over the far half of it.
*Ten.*
Then it went out of my stomach and into everything at once.
The thing under my ribs on the left pulled itself closed from the inside, and it hurt a great deal more going closed than it had hurt being open, and my eyes watered.
> **[Health: 241/430 → 301/430.]**
Sixty. Every time, sixty, out of a bottle that anybody can find in a crate.
Two hundred and forty-one to three hundred and one, out of four hundred and thirty, and I have one bottle left and it is blue and it does not do this.
---
I got the armour back on over it.
The bent strip went back in against my ribs and I put a fold of the shirt between the two and it was better and it was not good.
Then the gauntlets.
Scraped across the knuckle plates on both, worse on the right, with the finish gone off the front edges again in exactly the places the technician had brought it back four hours ago.
I closed both fists and the plates came in clean, four clicks a side, all the way out to the first knuckles.
The ring turned once on the finger underneath when I did it.
---
> **[Second Battlefield Contraction commencing in 05:00.]**
The map redrew and the new region was a great deal smaller than the old one.
Perhaps a fifth of it. All of the field walls I was sitting behind were outside it, and so was the road, and so was every metre of that aqueduct.
I turned round to look at what was inside it.
---
It sits on the high ground about two kilometres south, on its own, with the land falling away from it on three sides.
A curtain wall, pale stone gone the colour of bone, running round the top of the hill in a rough oval with square towers set into it at intervals.
About a third of the northern face is gone, lying down the slope in blocks the size of carts.
Inside the wall the roofs have gone entirely, so what stands up above the parapet is a set of gable ends and one broad tower with the top three metres missing off it.
A causeway comes up the western slope to a gatehouse with no gates in it.
Everything between me and that hill is open grass.
---
They were already going.
Ones and twos out of the walls below me, and a group of four coming up off the road together, all of them heading south across the open, none of them running yet.
And a long way over on the west side, where the ground comes up out of the ravine on a different track entirely, one man on his own, walking, with something long carried low on his right.
He did not look across.
There was no reason to. There is one place to be in five minutes and everybody who is still alive knows where it is.
---
> **[Challengers Remaining: 60.]**
Sixty.
Twenty come out of here. Forty more have to go, and there are sixty of us being pushed onto one hill with a wall round it.
I came off the field wall and started south across the grass.