Chapter 114 - 112 — One Too Many II
I got both gauntlets up because there was time for nothing else and he put his fist into them.
Everything from my wrists to the base of my skull arrived at once.
My arms folded back into my own chest and my boots came off the paving and I went about four metres across that courtyard without touching it, and when my heel came down the slab under it split.
> **[Health: 197/430 → 168/430.]**
Stone chips came off it and went into my shins and one of them went past my ear.
The gauntlets were still ringing. Both of them, a high thin note that went on for three or four seconds after the impact, and I could feel it in my teeth.
He was already coming again.
I got off the line and put the right hand into his ribs on the open side where the plates were missing, properly, everything I had.
He took it.
He did not go anywhere. He turned about fifteen degrees with it and let it land and brought his other arm round in the same movement.
That told me exactly what he was, which is a man who has decided that trading is a strategy because he has done the arithmetic on both sides of it.
I got most of the way out and not all of the way.
The bracer came across my shoulder and the top of my chest and put me into a waist-high wall backward.
> **[Health: 168/430 → 141/430.]**
The wall came apart under my back and I went down into the pieces of it, and I got up out of them, and he was walking after me and taking his time about it.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
I went, and I did not go at him.
The eleven metres to the corner of the collapsed building went underneath my boots and I was on every one of them.
I came round the standing corner with the arrest going up through my ankle into the hip, and I took it, and came out of it on his left.
He got about a third of the way round.
I put both hands into the side of his head and neck with the whole of the crossing still in me.
He went into the corner of that building and the corner of that building did not hold.
The remaining wall came inward on top of him. Two courses of block and everything above them.
The dust came out of it in a single push and went across the courtyard at knee height, and pieces of masonry the size of my fist came out rolling, and one of them went past my boot.
I could not see him for about three seconds.
---
Then something moved in it and he came out through the dust on his own feet.
He had it in his eyebrows and his mouth and there was a fresh cut across the bridge of the broken nose, and he was laughing.
Not loudly.
"Rory," he said. "Kavanagh. Say it after."
Then he stopped laughing and said one word I did not know.
"Ríastrad."
His breathing changed first.
It went from a man breathing hard to something slower and much deeper, in through the nose, and it did not come back out for a long time.
Then everything across the tops of his shoulders and down both arms tightened, all of it, at once, and stayed tight. The bracers moved on his forearms because the forearms had changed shape inside them.
Two lines came up either side of his neck and stood out and stayed out.
The blood did not stop. The cut over his eye kept running and the shoulder that had been sitting low was still sitting low.
He simply stopped carrying any of it.
His eyes were still on me and they were still working. It was the grin that had gone somewhere else.
---
He came the same way and it was not the same speed.
I got off the line and the fist went past me into what was left of the waist-high wall, and about two metres of that wall stopped being a wall.
Blocks came out of it and went across the paving and one of them went end over end past the stairway and hit the bottom step.
The wind of it moved my hair.
I did not try to trade with that. I went into the ruins.
There are three standing walls on the southern side and a floor covered in the roof that used to be over it.
I got the middle wall between us and made him come round it, and he came round it rather than through it, which told me he was still choosing.
I got two in on the way past. Ribs, same side, no plates.
He turned into the second one instead of away from it.
---
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
The gold came up in a room with three walls and put everything in it into hard shadow, and I let him have the opening he had been asking for, and I went in under the arm.
The strike went across the ribs on the open side and stayed there for the whole two seconds I had my hand on him.
The smell came up between us immediately.
> **[Mana: 146/270 → 138/270.]**
He made a noise and it was not the noise I wanted.
He came off the wall with his hand still on the burn and he was laughing again, and he was faster coming out of it than he had been going in.
That is the whole of what I learned about it and it was enough. Every time I hurt him, whatever he had turned on turned up.
---
I went out of the ruin through the gap where the fourth wall should have been.
He did not follow me through the gap.
He came through the wall.
The whole of that side went out into the courtyard in front of him, block and timber and sixty years of roof, and it came at me flat and I did not clear all of it.
Something took me across the cheekbone and opened it.
> **[Health: 141/430 → 133/430.]**
I got my forearm up and my eyes shut and my footing wrong, and that was the exchange he had been waiting for.
The bracer came in under my raised arm and went into the left side of my ribs, into the panel, into the place the animal had already opened.
The armour folded. I felt the metal strips inside it go, all of them at once, and the whole assembly drove in against me.
Then I was off the ground.
I went backward through the rotten interior wall of the second ruin and the timber came apart around me in long pieces, and plaster dust went into my open mouth and coated the whole back of my throat.
The floor took my shoulder first and my head about a fifth of a second later.
> **[Health: 133/430 → 71/430.]**
---
I got up before he came through the hole.
I do not remember the decision. My hands were under me and then my knees were and then I was standing with one shoulder against a joist.
Everything on my left had stopped being separate injuries and become one thing from the armpit to the hip.
He came through the hole.
He came slowly, which was worse.
I got both boots onto the flat of the floor slab, level, one at the back and one forward, and put my weight down through both of them.
> **[Ability Activated: Antaeus.]**
It came up out of the stone and filled my legs and my hips and the whole base of my spine.
The pain did not go. Everything that had been dragging at me stopped mattering as much as it had thirty seconds earlier, and my chest opened all the way for the first time since the fortress wall.
He arrived.
> **[Mana: 138/270 → 123/270.]**
I did not go anywhere.
The first one I took on crossed forearms and my boots stayed exactly where they were, and the paving under them cracked in a line that went out about a metre and a half in both directions.
The second one I got a hand inside and turned off my chest.
The third one I put my own into and both of us stopped.
For about a second and a half neither of us moved at all, and the whole of that force went down my legs into the floor of a building that had been standing there for sixty years.
He stopped hitting me.
He got his arm round my waist instead.
Everything I had was going down through my feet, and he simply took my feet off the ground.
> **[Antaeus: condition broken.]**
Both boots came up about twenty centimetres and it went out of me like a switch, and I was a hundred and eighty pounds of man with nothing underneath him.
He turned and drove me down.
The floor slab was already cracked from the first exchange and it did not survive the second one. It went in a rough circle around us and the whole centre of it dropped about fifteen centimetres, and I was in the bottom of that.
> **[Health: 71/430 → 34/430.]**
>
> **[Health: Critical.]**
---
Everything went narrow.
The edges of what I could see turned grey and stayed grey and did not come back for a long time, and there was one note in both ears and nothing else, and my mouth filled up.
I turned my head and got rid of it and it came back.
He was standing over me and he was in a worse state than I had understood.
The burn across his ribs had taken the shirt and a good deal of what was under it.
The eyebrow was still running and there was blood coming out of his mouth now, from something inside, and his left arm was hanging in a way that arms do not.
He did not appear to know about any of it.
The grin had got wider and it had stopped being aimed at anything. He was not watching my hands any more. He had not covered an opening in about ninety seconds and he was not going to start.
My right hand closed on nothing and I felt the band under the plate.
Then he came and I let go of it.
---
> **[Ability Activated: Snare.]**
His lead foot went down on the broken slab and stopped being his.
> **[Mana: 123/270 → 113/270.]**
Everything above the ankle kept coming, all of it, at the speed he had committed to, and a man in his condition should have gone over sideways and stayed there.
He twisted round the fixed point instead.
I heard something go in his leg. Not a small sound.
He kept turning, with the foot locked and the knee going the other way, until the contact broke, and then he came out of it dragging that leg and still coming forward, and he nearly had me.
I got out from under it on my hands and one knee.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
I came up under the arm and put both hands into the burn.
> **[Mana: 113/270 → 107/270.]**
He went down onto one knee on the broken floor with his hand flat on the stone.
Then he got up.
---
I had nothing left that worked.
My arms were coming up to about the height of my sternum and stopping. The left one was not really coming up at all.
I had backed into the remains of the collapsed arch on the eastern side of that ruin, with rubble behind my heels and stone on both sides of me.
He came out of the hole in the floor and got both feet under him and set for it, and it was the first thing he had set for properly in two minutes.
He was going to finish it and I could not stop him.