Chapter 115 - 113 — One Too Many III (Bonus)
The animal had been circling that fight for four minutes.
It had come into the western end of the ruin twice while we were in it and gone back out both times, once when the wall came down and once when the floor did.
Since then it had been standing off in the smoke with its head low and its shoulder open where something had already had a piece of it.
It had not left. There was blood on that floor and a very great deal of noise and it kept coming back to the edge of it.
It came in while his weight was going forward.
It took him across the upper back and the shoulder and it did not knock him down. It knocked him about thirty degrees off the line he had committed to, and his whole charge went past my right side into the arch.
That is all it was. It was not a plan and I did not make it happen.
> **[Ability Activated: Snare.]**
His lead foot came down on the cracked paving and I put it there.
> **[Mana: 107/270 → 97/270.]**
The animal’s weight was still on his upper body dragging him one way and his foot was fixed to the stone under him and his hip and his knee went in two different directions.
He got his good arm up and put an elbow through the animal’s skull, and it came off him and went down and did not move again.
But he was standing on a leg that was pointing wrong and his shoulders were round the wrong way.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
Four metres. I was on all of them and I could not have done eight.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
> **[Mana: 97/270 → 89/270.]**
I got the right hand under the jaw with everything that was left in my hip and my back and the arrest still going up my leg.
His good hand came up and got the front of my armour.
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
His fist closed on nothing. There was no blood on him anywhere and there had been a great deal of it a second before.
The last thing he did was laugh, with his hand still shut on air, and he was still doing it when the light took him.
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
>
> **[Level 15.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 150.]**
>
> **[EXP: 555/1,300 → 705/1,300.]**
> **[Challengers Remaining: 20.]**
---
The courtyard went quiet for about one second and it was the loudest second of the entire floor.
> **[Floor One clear condition fulfilled.]**
>
> **[You have qualified.]**
>
> **[Floor Two unlocked.]**
>
> **[Top Twenty confirmed.]**
> **[Placement Phase commencing.]**
>
> **[Final placement determines Floor One reward.]**
Then everything started moving again.
---
I did not go anywhere for a moment because my legs were not available.
I had a hand on the broken arch and most of my weight on it and my knees were doing something on their own that I could not stop.
There was blood coming out from under the warped edge of the panel and running down onto my hip, steadily, with nothing dramatic about it.
The whole left side of the armour had gone in. When I looked down at it the outline of a bracer was in the hide.
Every time my ribs opened it caught and stopped and I had to start the breath again.
I tried to close my right fist and it went most of the way and shook.
---
There was a vial on the floor slab where he had gone.
Reinforced glass with a metal cap crimped on, about the size of my thumb, and the liquid in it moved slower than it should have and left a film on the inside when I turned it over.
That is not what I have been drinking all day.
I got behind the deepest thing left, which was the angle where the collapsed arch met the keep foundation, and I tore the cap off with my teeth and drank it.
It was bitter at the front of the tongue and worse at the back, and it went down thick and coated everything on the way, and my eyes watered for a completely mechanical reason.
> **[Recovery effect applied.]**
>
> **[Health regeneration increased.]**
> **[Health: 34/430 → 79/430.]**
It did not close anything.
> **[Health: 79/430 → 124/430.]**
The bleeding under the panel went from running to seeping and then stopped being interesting.
> **[Health: 124/430 → 169/430.]**
The shaking came out of my forearms. That was the part I noticed most, because I had not been able to make it stop.
> **[Health: 169/430 → 214/430.]**
Then it finished, and I was at two hundred and fourteen out of four hundred and thirty, and everything still hurt exactly as much as it had.
---
I got the blue bottle out as well and drank that.
Warm rather than cold, and it went straight in instead of sitting there.
> **[Mana: 89/270 → 149/270.]**
Sixty. The same sixty the other kind gives, in the other column.
That is the pouch empty. Two hundred and fourteen and a hundred and forty-nine, against nineteen people who have all just been told that where they finish decides what they get.
---
They were not waiting for me.
The pair who had come in through the eastern breach four metres apart finally stopped being a pair.
One of them did it first, from behind, at the exact moment the other one turned to look at something, and it was not a decision he made in that second. He had been going to do it for ten minutes.
A third man who had been moving with them looked at that for about a second and a half and then simply walked away from both of them across the open, taking nothing with him, spending nothing.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 18.]**
---
Four of the animals came out of the western rubble together into the middle of it.
A thin man near the keep put both hands out and something went across the courtyard in a flat arc at knee height, and two of them came apart in it, and the wall behind them lost a course.
Then he was standing there with his arms down and nothing left in him and it was obvious from thirty metres.
The woman with the spear came off the angle in the wall where she had been standing for six minutes.
She did not run at him. She went along the wall to where the ground was flat and clear and she had the light behind her, and only then did she close, and she took nine seconds to cover twelve metres.
He got one hand up.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 17.]**
She went straight back to a wall afterward.
---
I came out of the corner because a corner is only cover until somebody has watched you go into it.
Everything was smaller than it had been. The circle had come in twice while I was on the floor and the western half of the keep was outside it now.
I went along the eastern side with the stairway on my left.
---
He was up on the landing.
Eleven steps of stairway that go up and stop, and he was standing on the top of it with the blade low and he was not fighting anybody.
Two men came round the bottom of it and one of them went up.
He let him get to the sixth step.
Then he came down two and put the blade through the man’s guard at the height of the shoulder, and the man went backward down eleven steps into the other one, and both of them ended up at the bottom.
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
He was already back on the landing. He did not go after the second one, who had a great deal of the first one’s problem on him and left.
Somebody below me said a name out loud to nobody in particular.
"Krüger."
Then he said it again and moved.
---
> **[Challengers Remaining: 15.]**
The floor kept working.
A big man with a shield had made himself a position out of two waist-high walls meeting at a corner and he had been in it for a long time.
He was still in it when a Warg came over the top of one of the walls behind him, and he turned round for it, which was correct, and it put him one step out of the corner.
Somebody who had been waiting for exactly that came in through the front.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 13.]**
Off to the south, two of them fought each other for about forty seconds too long, and the boundary came across the southern ruins while they were still doing it.
One of them got out. He was not the one who was winning.
---
I came round the base of the keep and there was a man in the gap I was going through.
He had got there first and he was not going to move, because behind him was the only piece of standing wall on that side and both of us knew what it was worth.
He came at me with a short weapon and a great deal of purpose and nothing behind either of them.
His right leg had already gone. He was putting weight on it and then taking it off inside the same step.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
I put the first one into the guard to make him stand on it.
He stood on it. The leg went. He got the weapon across and I took it on the forearm plate.
> **[Health: 214/430 → 186/430.]**
Then the second one under the jaw.
> **[Mana: 149/270 → 141/270.]**
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
>
> **[Level 12.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 120.]**
>
> **[EXP: 705/1,300 → 825/1,300.]**
I did not look at what he left. There is nowhere left to carry anything to.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 10.]**
---
I saw him once more before the last of it.
He had lost the shoulder section off the right side of the cuirass entirely and there was blood coming down that forearm and going off the back of his hand onto the stone in single drops.
His breathing had changed. I could see it from twenty metres, in the shoulders.
A man came at him out of the smoke on the western side and he dealt with it in about two seconds, and he did the same thing he had done on the stairway, which was step into it rather than away.
Then he checked behind himself, twice, before he moved.
He did not look at me at all.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 9.]**
---
The animals went last.
Three of them were still inside the circle with us and they went through the middle of the survivors in the final minute, and they took one man off the count and got themselves killed doing it.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 8.]**
Then the boundary came in again and somebody on the southern side did not get out of the ruins in time.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 7.]**
---
Seven.
I could see five of them from where I was standing and I knew where the sixth was.
The woman with the spear, in against a wall on the southern side with the whole of the open ground in front of her and nothing behind her, still doing the thing that had got her this far.
The big man with the shield, out of his corner now because his corner was outside, with half the facing gone off the shield and a limp, and he was still trying to find two walls that met.
The thin one who threw things, moving, constantly, never in the same place for more than about eight seconds, and running out of places to be.
A woman with a two-handed axe near the keep who had stopped moving altogether. Her left leg was dragging and she had picked one piece of ground and she was going to make everybody come to her on it.
A lean man with a short blade in each hand who had not stood still once since I had first noticed him, going round the outside of everything, waiting for two other people to be busy.
And Krüger, on the eastern side, in the open, walking.
---
I turned the ring once on the finger under the plate with my thumb.
Cold. Unused. Two attempts at this floor, and two hundred and fourteen out of four hundred and thirty, and I still have not spent it.
The boundary came in one more time and put all seven of us onto the same two hundred metres of broken paving.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 7.]**
>
> **[Final Placement Phase.]**
>
> **[First Place Reward: Pending.]**
I closed both gauntlets.