Chapter 112 - 110 — No Safe Ground III (Bonus)
I got the armour sorted as well as it was going to get.
The top fastening was gone entirely so I took a strap off the pouch and put it through the buckle hole and round under my arm and pulled it tight, and the panel came back against my ribs and stayed there.
It sat about two centimetres off where it should have been.
The gauntlets were scraped down to bright metal across the knuckles on both, from stone as much as from anything else, and there was a groove across the back of the right one where a claw had come off it.
I closed both fists and the plates came in clean.
---
The Warg came through the gatehouse arch while I was coming back out into the courtyard.
It was going for a man on his own about fifteen metres inside the gate, and I looked because it was noise and movement, and then I kept looking.
He let it come.
He did not set for it and he did not back off, and when it went up into the lunge he moved about a metre to his right and the blade came off the low carry.
It went across the animal’s neck while the animal was still in the air with nothing under it, and the two halves of that lunge landed in different places.
The cuirass was scratched down the front in three long lines and had not been when I saw him on the crossing.
His hair was dark with sweat where it was tied back, and there was blood along his left sleeve from the elbow down, and it was not his.
The notch in the top of his left ear caught the light when he turned his head.
---
The one who had been waiting for that came off the wall about four metres behind him.
He had timed it properly. He came in while the man’s blade was still down at the end of the cut with the whole of his back open.
The man did not turn round.
He stepped back into the attack instead of away from it, which put him inside the swing, and the blade came up behind him without his shoulders following it and went into the man’s stomach on the way past.
Then he turned.
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
> **[Challengers Remaining: 47.]**
---
We ended up in the same twelve metres about a minute later, going the same way round the base of the keep, because everything on the eastern side had become impassable.
Neither of us stopped walking.
He looked at the strap I had put round my own ribs, and at the panel sitting off them, and at the whole left side of my shirt, and then back up at my face.
I had a look at him at the same time. Three lines down the cuirass, a sleeve dark to the wrist, and about two hundred metres of that fortress behind him with things lying in it.
"You will be in the last twenty," he said.
I did not answer that.
"So will I. We can do it properly there."
Then a Warg came out of the barracks between us and we went different ways round it, and I did not see him again for a while.
---
> **[Second Battlefield Contraction initiated.]**
The whole fortress moved at once.
Every man who had spent ten minutes making a position out of a piece of wall came off it inside about four seconds, because the map had just told all of them that the wall was going to be outside.
They came out of the barracks doorways in threes.
Two men who had been fighting each other on the steps of the keep stopped in the middle of it, and one of them went left and one went right and neither of them looked back.
Somebody dropped a shield rather than carry it.
And three of the animals came through the middle of all that movement at once, because forty people had just started running in a stone courtyard.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 44.]**
---
A man near the gatehouse finally got his Warg down and then made the mistake.
He put his hands on his knees for perhaps two seconds before he started running, and two seconds was the whole of his margin.
Somebody came at him at the boundary and he had to stop and turn, and they got about three exchanges done.
Then the air over both of them went wrong.
They came apart and went for the inside together, side by side, having entirely forgotten about each other, and neither of them made it. The armour went grey on both, from the outside in, in patches that joined.
The first one went down at fifteen metres.
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
The second one got about four more paces.
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
Off to my right, somebody else came out of a fight he was winning, turned his back on it entirely, and sprinted for the keep.
---
There is a passage between the last barracks and the inner wall that is about a metre and a half wide, and it is the short way through, and there were people going into both ends of it.
I went in from the north.
He came at me at the halfway point and he was finished before he started.
Leather and a mail collar, a short weapon, and he was breathing the way you breathe when the thing you are about to do is the fourth thing too many.
He came anyway. Elimination is another two months and another registration and he knew what he was choosing.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
Two seconds. He got one in on the shoulder guard and I got past it.
> **[Mana: 150/270 → 146/270.]**
> **[Health: 212/430 → 197/430.]**
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
>
> **[Level 11.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 110.]**
>
> **[EXP: 445/1,300 → 555/1,300.]**
Five hundred and fifty-five out of thirteen hundred.
Seven hundred and forty-five short, at a hundred and ten a man, which is about seven more people than there are going to be.
That level is not happening on this floor and I stopped thinking about it in the passage.
---
> **[Challengers Remaining: 37.]**
The inner courtyard is smaller and it had more people in it than the outer one had.
They were coming in from the western side in a body while I came in from the north, and for about twenty seconds nobody was fighting anybody, because everybody was working out who was closest.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 32.]**
A man came at me off the left with something two-handed and I did not fight him properly.
I put the forearm plates into the haft, turned him, and went past.
He came after me for four paces and then somebody else arrived at him from the other direction and he had to deal with that instead, and I did not look back to see how it went.
Something hit the keep wall above us and stone came down on both of us and on three other people.
Then a Warg came through the western gap into the middle of all of it and about six people had to stop doing what they were doing.
I used those four seconds.
I went along the inside of the eastern wall with my shoulder on it and my head down.
Two men were fighting directly in front of me and I went round the outside of them, and one of them swung at me on the way past out of pure irritation and missed.
Twenty is the number. Twenty is the whole of it.
There is no line on that display anywhere that pays me for being the last one standing.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 27.]**
---
I came out of the fortress through the eastern breach and down the slope into the open, and about forty metres out I stopped being in a crowd.
That is what happens. The bottleneck ends and the survivors go from being on top of each other to being two hundred metres apart, because there are twenty-seven people left and a great deal of ground.
I got behind a stand of stone that had been part of something once and put my back on it.
---
The shirt was stiff from the ribs to the hip and dark, and there was a wet edge to it lower down where the movement had opened something small again.
My breathing was still going about two thirds of the way in and stopping, and it had been doing that since the wall.
The panel was sitting off my ribs on the pouch strap and the claw marks went across it in four lines and one of the metal strips inside was through the hide in two places now.
Both gauntlets scraped to bright metal. Both working.
> **[Health: 197/430.]**
>
> **[Mana: 146/270.]**
A hundred and ninety-seven out of four hundred and thirty and a hundred and forty-six out of two hundred and seventy, and one blue bottle in the pouch that puts back mana and does nothing at all for the other one.
The ring was still cold on the third finger under the plate.
---
> **[Challengers Remaining: 23.]**
Three.
Three more people go out and the rest of us have cleared Floor One.
> **[Final Battlefield Contraction commencing.]**
The map came up and drew the last circle on itself and it was not large.
A few hundred metres across, out on the open ground south-east of the fortress, with nothing in it that I could see from here except grass and two or three low stone shapes.
Everything I was standing on was outside it.
---
They were moving already.
I could count nine of them from where I stood, spread across half a kilometre of open ground, all going the same way and none of them going quickly.
Nobody runs at twenty-three. Running is how you arrive somewhere first and alone with twenty-two other people behind you.
And a long way over on the western side, coming down off the causeway on his own, there was a man walking with something long carried low on his right.
---
> **[Challengers Remaining: 23.]**
>
> **[Final Battlefield Contraction: 02:59.]**
I put a hand on the strap round my ribs and pulled it through another two centimetres and made the panel sit where it was going to have to sit.
Then I came out from behind the stone and started for the last circle.
Three more.