Chapter 116 - 114 — First Place I
**POV: Jace**
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> **[Challengers Remaining: 7.]**
Two hundred metres of paving and the bottom half of a keep.
That was the whole of the world by then.
Three columns had come off the western colonnade and gone over at an angle without breaking, so they lay across the courtyard on their sides at about waist height with their bases still in the ground.
The keep had shed most of its western face into a grey heap that came out about eight metres from the wall, and the pieces at the top of that heap moved when anybody put weight on them.
Smoke sat under an open sky with no wind in it.
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There were four animals dead on that ground and three men’s worth of equipment lying where it had come down.
A shield with the facing split. A long weapon somebody had let go of. A helmet on its side about six metres from anything.
The paving was dark in more places than it was not.
It smelled of dust off broken stone, and blood, and the flat scorched thing that masonry does when something has gone into it hard, and wet fur, which was the worst of the four because it did not belong in a courtyard.
And out past the last standing wall on every side there was the boundary, sitting there and glowing very slightly, closer than it had been a minute ago.
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I could hear people breathing.
That is how quiet it was in the middle of it.
Somebody forty metres away with his mouth open, and loose stone shifting under a boot on the rubble heap, and under everything a low sound off the boundary that I had not been able to hear all day.
I had the strap round my ribs and the panel underneath it had gone in far enough that the shape of a bracer was in the hide.
I could not turn to the left past about thirty degrees without stopping.
So I did not turn left. I put my whole body round instead, from the feet, every time, which is slow and which was the only thing available.
The gauntlet plates had loosened on the right. There was play in them now that had not been there this morning.
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Nobody moved for about twenty seconds.
Seven people on two hundred metres of ground, and all seven of us had spent nine hours getting here, and every one of us had just been told that where we finished decided what we got.
Nobody wanted to be seventh.
Seventh is the man who attacks first and gets it wrong.
Feet went out and came back. Weapons came off shoulders and stayed low. Everybody in that courtyard was standing at an angle that let him see two other people at once and nobody had his back to open ground.
The woman with the two-handed axe had put herself on the flat by the keep and had not moved a boot.
The lean one with the two short blades went round the outside of all of it, slowly, and stopped when anybody looked at him.
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Krüger was on the eastern side with a column between him and half the courtyard.
The right shoulder section was gone off the cuirass entirely and the arm underneath it was dark to the wrist. His breathing had got heavier and it was the only thing about him that had changed.
He moved twice while I watched him and both times it was two or three paces, and both times it was because the boundary had come in and taken the ground he had been standing on.
He never once let two of us get behind him at the same time. When the axe woman shifted her weight he shifted with her, four metres, without looking at her directly.
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The thin one was up on the keep stairway.
Eleven steps and a landing, and he had the landing.
Lean, in a dark coat that had been torn open across the chest with light armour under it, and a short bow he could brace against his hip on that narrow landing.
He put one into the axe woman’s ground and made her come off it two metres. He put one at the lean man with the blades and made him go round a column.
Then he moved. Every single time, immediately, two or three paces along the landing, and he did it before anybody could put a line on where the shot had come from.
He had been doing that for nine hours and it had got him into the last seven.
Then the boundary came across the top of the keep.
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It took the landing and the top four steps.
I watched him work it out. He looked at it, and at the eleven steps under him, and at the courtyard at the bottom of them, and there was nowhere in either direction.
He came down.
He came down fast and he came down at the one part of the courtyard that had nothing standing in it, and the spearwoman came off the wall she had been holding for six minutes.
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She had been underneath that stairway the whole time.
Compact, and put together for it, with her hair bound flat to her skull so that nothing was going to come across her eyes. Light armour, opened across the ribs on one side and not replaced.
The spear went out in front of her and it did not wander. The point stayed where she had put it and she moved her body round behind it.
He tried to make distance.
He went right, which was the open way, and she was already on the open way.
So he went left into the shadow of the stairway and she had that too, because she had been standing under it deciding which way he would go for six minutes.
He got the bow up once. She put the shaft across it.
Then she walked him backward eight metres into the boundary side and did not let him past on either hand, and when he committed to going through her she was not where he committed to.
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
>
> **[Challengers Remaining: 6.]**
She went straight back to a wall.
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The axe woman came at me while that was happening.
She had held one piece of ground for a quarter of an hour and then the circle had taken her piece of ground, and something had gone out of her when it did.
She came across the open with the axe already up and her left leg dragging behind her and no plan that I could see beyond arriving.
I got the haft on the forearm plates and turned it off my shoulder and put four metres back between us.
She came again immediately.
Then the shield came in from her right and took her off her feet.
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He had wanted the same piece of ground.
Broad through the chest and everything below it, with a rectangular shield that had lost most of one corner and a short blade held tucked in behind the rim where you could not see what it was doing.
He had been trying to find two walls that met since the placement phase started and there was one such corner left in that courtyard and she was standing in it.
She got up. She was quick getting up for a woman with a leg like that.
Then it went the way that always goes.
She went round him, and he turned, and she went round him the other way, and he turned. He did not chase her once. He gave her the outside and kept the corner.
She got two into the shield hard enough that the split corner opened another hand’s width.
Then she overreached on the third and he came out from behind it and put the rim into her chest and the rest of it into the masonry behind her, and she went into the stone and stayed against it.
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
> **[Challengers Remaining: 5.]**
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The last animal came out from under the collapsed section of the keep about ten seconds later.
It had been under there a long time. One ear was gone at the base and the fur down its whole left side had been burned off and the skin under it was black and split.
The rear leg on that side came through late every stride.
It was not hunting. The circle had taken everything it had and it came out into the light with its head swinging.
Then it fixed on the nearest thing standing up, which was the man in the corner with the broken shield.
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He turned into it. He did not go anywhere.
It hit the shield at the top of a lunge and moved him three full steps back out of his own corner, and the split corner went the rest of the way and came off the frame entirely and landed on the paving.
He got the blade into it twice from behind the rim while it was still on him.
The second one did it. The animal came off the shield and went down sideways and got one leg under it and did not get the second one.
He put a boot on its neck and finished it.
Then he stood there in the open with two thirds of a shield and his mouth open, and his chest going, and the corner four metres behind him.
She was already moving.
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She did not say anything and she did not run.
She came in on the side the shield had stopped covering and she made him turn toward her, and every time he got the frame round she went one pace further round than he could turn.
He was very hard to remove. That is the honest truth of it. She put the point into his shoulder and his hip and the side of his knee and none of them did what she wanted, because there was plate under all three.
She did it four more times anyway, patiently, with no anger in it at all.
Then he turned too far trying to get the frame across, and his back foot came round after his shoulders instead of before them, and she was inside the shield.
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
> **[Challengers Remaining: 4.]**
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Four.
Me. Her. Krüger. The lean one with the two blades.
The boundary came in again while all four of us were still looking at each other, and it took the whole western side including the rubble heap.
What was left was about ninety metres of paving with three fallen columns on it and one standing wall.
There was no version of the next minute where any of us stayed apart.
She looked at me and she looked at Krüger, and I watched her make the decision, and I did not have to guess what it was based on because it was strapped to my ribs.
The lean one went the other way, toward Krüger, and he did not do it because he wanted Krüger.
He did it because standing between the three of us was worse.