Chapter 111 - 109 — No Safe Ground II
The stone was cold enough to come through the armour and the shirt at the same time as the impact did, and grit came down the face of it past my ear.
Everything I had in my lungs went out of me and did not come back.
Its head was already coming round.
I got the left gauntlet across and it went wide of my throat and the foreleg came through instead.
The first swipe went across the front of the hide armour and did what the armour is for.
The second one went in under the panel on my left, where the metal strip had come through from the inside and the hide was already open, and it did not have anything to get through.
> **[Health: 301/430 → 272/430.]**
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> **[Health: 272/430 → 258/430.]**
>
> **[Health: 258/430 → 219/430.]**
It went in cold and came out hot.
That is the whole of what it felt like for about two seconds. Then the heat spread down under the armour and into the waist of my trousers, and it kept spreading, and every part of it was warm and moving.
I got both hands into the animal’s chest and pushed and it came off me half a metre.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
I could not turn left properly. Everything on that side had gone tight and short and my breath was coming in about a third of the way and stopping.
So I did not turn left. I brought the right hand round the outside and gave it the whole of my hip and let the left one do nothing except be in the way.
Two into the side of the head and one under the jaw, and it went down against the wall with its back legs still working.
> **[Mana: 186/270 → 176/270.]**
> **[Warg eliminated.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 60.]**
>
> **[EXP: 115/1,300 → 175/1,300.]**
---
I got a hand inside the armour and brought it out and looked at it.
There was more than I wanted there.
The shirt had gone dark from the bottom of the ribs to below the belt and it was still going, and when I breathed all the way in the edges of it pulled.
I did not have anywhere to do anything about that.
There were four people crossing the courtyard within thirty metres of me and two of them had already looked over.
---
> **[Challengers Remaining: 56.]**
The fortress kept working while I stood there.
A man on the far side finally put a Warg down beside the barracks and folded forward over his own knees with the weapon still in one hand.
Somebody came out of the broken masonry behind him at a walk and was on him before he had got his back straight.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 54.]**
And the pair under the eastern wall finished theirs.
Both animals went down within about four seconds of each other, and neither of those two men said anything, and both of them started walking backward at the same time.
They got about eight metres apart before either of them turned round.
---
Then somebody came out from between two of the barracks about twenty metres to my right.
He had killed something. There was a Warg lying in the gap behind him with its head at the wrong angle.
His shoulder plate had been taken off him along with a good deal of what was underneath, and the arm on that side was hanging lower than the other one and swinging when he walked.
He was breathing loudly enough that I could hear it across twenty metres of courtyard with a battle going on in it.
I went.
He got his head up at about eight metres, which was better than I expected, and he brought the weapon round into a guard on his good side and set his feet.
He was not going to run. There is nowhere to run to on a floor like this and he knew it.
I came in on the hanging arm.
He turned to cover it, which put his good side away from me, and that is the whole of the problem with a bad shoulder and there is nothing anybody can do about it.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
I took one across the forearm plates getting inside.
> **[Health: 219/430 → 206/430.]**
Then the left hand into the open shoulder, and he came round it, and the right into the side of the neck.
> **[Mana: 176/270 → 170/270.]**
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
>
> **[Level 12.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 120.]**
>
> **[EXP: 175/1,300 → 295/1,300.]**
---
His things came down on the flags and one of them rolled.
A squat glass bottle, corked, going across the stone toward the well, and I put a boot in front of it and picked it up and put it in the pouch and did not look at anything else.
Then I started moving again.
I got about nine metres.
---
He came off the base of the keep at an angle that had nothing to do with where I was going.
He had been going somewhere else. I watched him change his mind, in the middle of a stride, with his head turned at my left side, and after that he came at me and not past me.
Ring mail over a padded coat, good condition, none of it broken anywhere. A shield about the width of his own chest strapped to the left forearm and a straight sword in the right.
Heavy through the legs, and he came at a run and did not slow down for the last four metres.
I took the shield rim on the gauntlets and it moved me.
> **[Health: 206/430 → 181/430.]**
Both boots came back over the flags and my heel found the edge of a slab, and everything on my left side went white for about a second and I lost the whole of the breath I had been holding.
The sword came round the outside of the shield while I was still going backward.
I got most of it. Most is not all, and it went across the front of the hide armour and took the top fastening off, so that the entire left panel came away from my ribs and hung there.
> **[Health: 181/430 → 152/430.]**
Then it was flapping every time I moved, and every time it moved it pulled on the open part underneath.
He came again on the same side.
He had worked it out inside two exchanges. He kept the shield high on my left and made me turn that way to see round it, and every time I turned that way something in my ribcage arrived about half a second late.
I gave ground twice more and both times he took the ground.
The third time I ran out of things to give, because the well was behind me.
So I stopped giving it.
There is a run of large flat slabs around the well head, cut properly and bedded, and I got both boots onto one of them and squared up and stopped moving at all.
> **[Ability Activated: Antaeus.]**
It comes up through the soles first.
Everything from the ankles to the hips gets heavy and then stops being mine and starts being part of the ground.
My chest opened up about twice as far as it had been opening, and the tightness on the left went from a wall down to a line.
He came in expecting me to go backward again.
I did not go backward. The shield arrived and I put a forearm on it and he stopped, all of him, at once, and the whole of the momentum went down through my legs into the slab and the slab took it.
His feet slid instead of mine.
> **[Mana: 170/270 → 158/270.]**
Four seconds is all I bought and I knew what I was buying.
He got the sword up over the top of the shield and put it down at my head.
I did not move my feet, because moving my feet ends it, so I took it on the right forearm plate and it rang all the way to my elbow.
Then I got my left hand round the top edge of the shield and pulled.
He came with it. He had to. It was strapped to his arm.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
The gold came up between the shield and his face and I saw him look at it.
I dropped the right-arm block and brought the hand straight in. The first strike went into the inside of his arm above the shield strap. The second went into his throat over the top edge of the mail.
> **[Mana: 158/270 → 150/270.]**
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
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> **[Level 15.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 150.]**
>
> **[EXP: 295/1,300 → 445/1,300.]**
---
> **[Challengers Remaining: 48.]**
I got behind a shoulder of the collapsed northern wall where two blocks had come down against each other, and I got about nine seconds.
The bottle came out of the pouch and the cork came out with my teeth and I drank the whole of it standing up.
Cold in the stomach and then nothing.
I counted, because it always does nothing for ten.
Somebody went past on the other side of the blocks at a run during six and seven and did not look into the gap.
Then it went out of my stomach into the rest of me and the open part under my ribs pulled itself shut from the inside, and it hurt considerably more closing than it had hurt open.
> **[Health: 152/430 → 212/430.]**
The bleeding stopped. That is not the same as it being over.
The skin was closed and the whole side of me from the armpit to the hip was one solid ache that got worse if I breathed all the way in.
The bruise underneath the ribs, where the animal had put me into the wall, had not gone anywhere at all.
Two hundred and twelve out of four hundred and thirty, and that was my last one.