Chapter 117 - 115 — First Place II
She came first and she came correctly.
The point went at my left side on the second stride and I had to turn my whole body to get it, from the feet, the slow way, and by the time I had turned she was a metre further round than she had been.
I went at her.
She gave me the ground. All of it, immediately, without any argument, and the point stayed exactly where it had been the whole time I was covering it.
I got two metres of that spear and nothing else.
Then she came back along it and put the shaft across the outside of my right gauntlet as I reached, and turned my whole arm out, and the point went in at the panel.
It went through the hide where the metal strips had failed.
> **[Health: 186/430 → 161/430.]**
It came up warm under the shirt immediately and spread down toward the belt, and my breath stopped halfway in and I had to start it again.
She was already two metres back.
That is the whole of what she did and there was nothing I could do about it with my hands, because everything I have is at the end of my arms and she was never going to let me get my arms anywhere.
I tried to close again and she took the ground again and put the point across the front of my thigh on the way.
> **[Health: 161/430 → 148/430.]**
---
Then she gave me the only thing she was ever going to give me.
She retreated along the line between two of the fallen columns, because it was open and flat and clear and it was the fastest ground available to her, and it was the third time she had used it.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
I went, and she had already turned the point onto where a man crossing that ground would arrive.
She was right. That is where a man crossing that ground arrives.
I put my left boot onto the side of the nearest fallen column at about a third of the way across and came off it, and the line changed by about two metres.
The arrest went up through the ankle and the whole of my hip complained about it.
She adjusted. She got most of the way there.
The butt of the spear came round instead of the point, because there was no time for the point, and it caught me across the top of the chest and did not stop me.
Then I was inside it.
Her back foot went out behind her to take the distance back.
> **[Ability Activated: Snare.]**
> **[Mana: 141/270 → 131/270.]**
The foot went down and stayed.
She did not fight it. She did not waste a quarter of a second trying to pull it out, and I want to be fair to her about that, because most people spend the quarter of a second.
She let the leg stay where it was and dropped her hands down the shaft and brought the middle of it up between us to hold me off at the length of her forearms.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
> **[Mana: 131/270 → 125/270.]**
I got my left hand over the top of the shaft and pushed it down, and put the right one through the space above it.
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
She was still trying to get the shaft back up when the light took her.
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
>
> **[Level 14.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 140.]**
>
> **[EXP: 825/1,300 → 965/1,300.]**
> **[Challengers Remaining: 3.]**
---
I turned round with my hand still out.
They were forty metres away between the last standing wall and the second column and they had been at it the whole time.
The lean one was better than he had looked from a distance.
He never stayed on one side. He went in on the left and came out on the right and never once put both feet down in the same place twice, and he had been cutting at the open shoulder where the cuirass section was missing.
He had already got him twice there. There was fresh blood on that arm going down over the old.
Krüger turned with him and did not chase him and did not lunge at any of it.
Then the lean one went in on the open side properly, both blades, committed, because he had done it three times and got away three times.
Krüger said one word.
"Aegis."
---
It came up over his right side only.
Not a wall and not a shell. A thin bend in the air about the width of his own shoulder, sitting a hand’s breadth off the cuirass, following the curve of it, and there was nothing on his left side at all.
The first blade went into it and stopped, and the impact did not stay where it landed. It went out across the whole of that curve at once, in a ring, and the surface went pale where it spread and came back.
He did not move. He did not brace and he did not step.
The second blade came in a fifth of a second later at the same place and the surface flexed and held again, and the lean one was now committed with both hands out and both feet planted.
Krüger came round the outside of his own guard and put the blade through his ribs.
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
>
> **[Challengers Remaining: 2.]**
---
Then the noise stopped.
That is what I noticed before anything else, and it was worse than the noise had been.
For nine hours there had been something happening within four hundred metres of me in every direction, continuously, and now there was a courtyard with two men standing in it and a low sound off a boundary and nothing else at all.
I could hear my own breathing and I could hear his.
---
He came round the end of the column and stopped at about twelve metres.
The shoulder was gone off the right of the cuirass and the arm under it was open in two places and dark from the elbow down.
It was dripping off the back of his hand onto the stone in single drops with a pause between them.
Three long scratches down the front of the plate. The tie had come out of his hair on one side.
And the breathing. It was going in through his mouth now and it had not been all day.
He looked at the strap round my ribs and the panel hanging on it and the whole left side of me.
Then he brought the blade up off the low carry and set his feet.
I closed both gauntlets and the loose plates on the right went in about half a centimetre further than they should have.
Then we went.
---
He does not waste anything.
That is the entire experience of fighting him. Every movement he made went to one place and did one job and stopped, and there was never any of it left over for me to use.
The first three came at my left side and all three were the same distance and the same speed, and I turned my whole body for all three and lost about a fifth of a second every time.
I got one in on the cuirass and it went nowhere.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
I put the right hand at his ribs with the gold all the way up my forearm.
"Aegis."
The bend came up over that side a fifth of a second before I arrived.
My fist went into it and the whole thing shuddered, and the impact went out across the curve in a ring the way it had with the blades, and it did not stop him going backward.
He went back a metre and a half with both boots on the ground the entire way, and the paving under his heels cracked in two lines.
> **[Mana: 125/270 → 117/270.]**
So it spreads it. It does not eat it.
He came straight back off that and put the blade at my ribs on the damaged side while I was still finishing the punch, and I got out of it by about four centimetres and felt it go across the panel.
---
> **[Talaria activated.]**
I took the long way round the second column.
He did not try to match it. He turned on the spot and put the bend up on the side he had decided I was coming from, and he was right, and I arrived into it.
The collision took a section out of the column that was already damaged.
Fragments went across the courtyard at knee height and the top two metres of that column came off and went down behind us and broke into three pieces on the paving.
He gave ground on that one and came back again.
I changed sides twice more. He adjusted twice more, and both times the bend was over the correct side before my hand got there, and it was not luck, because he was watching my hips.
So I stopped moving.
I got both boots flat on a slab that had nothing under it doing anything interesting.
> **[Ability Activated: Antaeus.]**
> **[Mana: 117/270 → 102/270.]**
The stone came up into my legs and my chest opened out and my ribs stopped being the loudest thing in my body.
He came in and I did not go anywhere at all.
The blade came off the bend of my forearm plate and I put the other hand through and hit the mantle and this time he went back three metres and had to put a hand down.
I hit it again and it went pale across a wider area and took longer to come back.
Then he stopped coming at the front.
He went out to my left, wide, and put the blade at the panel from an angle I could not cover without moving a foot.
I moved the foot.
> **[Antaeus: condition broken.]**