Chapter 118 - 116 — First Place III (Bonus)
He had watched me do it in Antaeus twice and he had watched me stand there both times, and then he had gone somewhere I would have to step to.
He did not know what it was. He did not need to know what it was.
After that he stopped trying to win an exchange and started spending me.
He gave ground when I had something and took it back when I did not. He put the blade at the same place on my left every time I got slow, and I got slow more often than I had ten minutes earlier.
He was not using the mantle unless he needed it.
I could see him deciding not to. Twice he took something on the flat of the blade instead and I understood exactly what that was, because I have been counting my own all day.
He had more left than I had. He had taken fewer fights and he had spent less in all of them and he had been doing that arithmetic since the deployment hall.
---
Then he got me properly.
I came in on the open shoulder and he was not there, and the blade came round and went into the panel edge on with the whole of his hip behind it.
The fastening I had made out of the pouch strap came away and the panel came off me entirely, and it went across the paving and slid.
Then I went through the last standing section of the western divider.
The stone came apart around my shoulder and I took most of a course of it across my back on the way down.
The dust came up and went straight into my mouth, and I could taste blood and grit at the same time and could not tell which was which.
> **[Health: 148/430 → 122/430.]**
There was one note in both ears.
I got up out of it and he was already there.
I hit at him and the mantle came up and I put it into that instead of into him.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
> **[Mana: 102/270 → 96/270.]**
Then he came back through it and put me into the base of the column with his shoulder and the blade came down across my forearm plate and the plate moved on the strap.
> **[Health: 122/430 → 61/430.]**
I got about a metre of space and he took it back.
The next one I did not see at all until it was on me.
> **[Health: 61/430 → 38/430.]**
>
> **[Health: Critical.]**
---
I was on one knee with the column against my back and my left hand flat on the paving.
He was four metres away and he was setting his feet, and he was going to do it in about two seconds, and I could not get up in two seconds.
My right hand closed.
I felt it come round against the finger beside it under the plate.
> **[Unique Relic activated.]**
>
> **[All Attributes ×10.]**
>
> **[Duration: 01:00.]**
> **[Strength: 33 → 330.]**
>
> **[Endurance: 43 → 430.]**
>
> **[Agility: 42 → 420.]**
>
> **[Perception: 28 → 280.]**
> **[Maximum Health: 430 → 4,300.]**
>
> **[Health: 38/430 → 380/4,300.]**
It did not fix anything.
Everything that was broken was still broken and I could feel every part of it, and the same eight point eight per cent of me was still there.
It just stopped mattering that it was only eight point eight per cent, because eight point eight per cent of four thousand three hundred is three hundred and eighty, and he had been taking about thirty a time.
---
Then the courtyard slowed down.
That is the only way I can put it and it is not accurate. Nothing slowed down. I simply had time inside it that I had not had a second earlier.
He was already moving and I could see every part of the movement separately. The weight going onto the front foot. The angle of the shoulder before the blade followed it.
I could see the drops coming off the back of his hand and I could see the gap between them.
I pushed off the column.
The slab under my boot did not take it. It went in four pieces and the pieces went behind me, and I was on him before the blade had got halfway round.
---
He did the only thing available.
"Aegis."
It came up over the front and it was concentrated into about half the area he had been using, and it was thicker, and he had read my line exactly right.
I hit it.
The dust came off the whole courtyard at once and went out in a ring at ankle height, and loose masonry came off the top of the rubble on the far side.
He went back through six metres of broken stone with both feet off the ground.
It held. He got it up in the right place and put everything into that one angle and it held.
But it was not the same afterward. It came back paler than it had been and it took about a second longer to do it, and there was a place near the top of the curve where the light in it was not even.
I went after him.
He did not try to take the second one.
He got behind the second column, and then behind the pieces of the first, and he changed direction three times in four seconds and made me spend all four of them, and that is a man with nothing left doing the correct thing anyway.
I caught him at the divider.
The mantle came up and I put my hand through it about half a metre.
> **[Mana: 96/270 → 88/270.]**
It did not break. It cracked, right across the middle of the curve, in a line that stayed there, and the whole of it went dull.
He went through the remains of the low divider and came out the other side of it into the open.
> **[Unique Relic Duration: 00:51.]**
Nine seconds.
Nine seconds to put a B-rank defence into that condition, and he was still standing up.
---
He stopped running.
He came round to face me and he brought the cracked mantle to the front, and then he did something that made me respect him a great deal more than anything he had done in the previous nine hours.
He stopped putting it up early.
He waited. He let me start, and he watched my hips, and he put the thing across at the last possible instant on the side I was actually going to.
He got it right twice.
The second time he came off the mantle with the blade and put it across my forearm on the way out.
> **[Health: 380/4,300 → 350/4,300.]**
Thirty. It had been about thirty a time all the way through that fight and it was still about thirty.
Thirty out of three hundred and fifty is a different sentence from thirty out of sixty-one, and that is the whole of what the ring had bought me.
Twice, against ×10 Perception, with a broken arm and a cracked mantle and a man coming at him faster than anything he had seen on that floor.
So I gave him something obvious.
I came at the front. Straight, wide open, with the right hand back where he could see it, and I made it look like the only thing I intended to do.
He put the whole of the cracked mantle across the front.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
I changed the line at three metres with my left foot.
He turned with me. He got most of the way.
His back foot went down on the paving to take him round the rest of the way.
> **[Ability Activated: Snare.]**
> **[Mana: 88/270 → 78/270.]**
His foot stopped and his shoulders kept going, and the mantle was still on the front and he was reaching for it with everything above the waist and he was not going to get there.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
> **[Mana: 78/270 → 72/270.]**
I went into the thin side.
The crack opened all the way across and the whole of it came apart, not outward, but into nothing, the way frost goes off a window.
The rest of what I had went into him.
He went off the ground and through the last standing section of the courtyard wall, and about four metres of it came down on top of where he landed, in blocks, and the dust went up over both of us.
---
He tried to stand.
He got a hand under himself in the middle of a collapsed wall, with his arm the way it was, and he got about halfway up.
He was bringing the blade round into a guard while he did it.
I was already there.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
> **[Mana: 72/270 → 66/270.]**
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
>
> **[Level 16.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 160.]**
>
> **[EXP: 965/1,300 → 1,125/1,300.]**
> **[Challengers Remaining: 1.]**
---
Then there was nothing.
I stood in the middle of a courtyard with three columns down and one wall gone and a great deal of other people’s equipment lying on the paving, and the dust came down out of the air onto all of it, and nothing moved anywhere.
The timer kept going in the corner of my eye.
> **[Unique Relic Duration: 00:34.]**
Thirty-four seconds of ×10 with nobody left to use it on.
I stood there and let it run, because there was nothing else to do with it, and because I was not going to be able to stand up when it stopped.
> **[Floor One Placement Complete.]**
>
> **[Placement: 1st / 100.]**
>
> **[Floor One clear confirmed.]**
>
> **[Floor Two unlocked.]**
---
Then it ended.
> **[Unique Relic effect concluded.]**
>
> **[Maximum Health: 4,300 → 430.]**
>
> **[Health: 350/4,300 → 35/430.]**
Everything arrived at once.
My knees went about ten centimetres and I got a hand onto the nearest thing, which was a piece of column, and stayed there.
The left side of my chest came back first and it came back complete. Then the shoulder.
Then the place under the ribs where the animal had been, and the place where the panel had been driven in, and the forearm where the plate had moved on the strap.
My breath went a third of the way in and stopped and I had to work at it.
I got my head down and stayed like that for about eight seconds.
Thirty-five out of four hundred and thirty.
---
> **[First Place Reward earned.]**
>
> **[Reward evaluation pending.]**
The courtyard started going while I was still holding the column.
Not fading. The far side of it stopped being far, and then stopped being a side, and the light came up out of the paving instead of down onto it.
The last thing I saw of Floor One was somebody’s helmet lying on its side about six metres from anything.
---
Then there was a floor under my boots that was flat and dry and level, and there was noise.
An enormous amount of it, all at once, after nine hours.
Hammering somewhere ahead and on the left. A long metal scrape. Forty conversations at the same time with nothing pulling out of them.
Hot fat and pepper and leather and oil.
> **[Health: 35/430 → 430/430.]**
>
> **[Mana: 66/270 → 270/270.]**
My body took a great deal longer than the number did. I stood in the middle of that passage with my hand still half closed round a column that was not there.
---
People noticed.
They had been coming back into that district for two hours and the last one back is the one who was still in there, and every person within thirty metres worked that out at about the same speed.
The talking went down and did not come all the way back.
Somebody said something and somebody else said the number.
I did not stay for it. I went along the wall toward the repair bays with my hand on the strap that was no longer holding anything.
---
He was on the bench outside the second bay.
Somebody had already been at the arm and it was wrapped from the wrist to above the elbow, and the cuirass was on the wood beside him with the shoulder section missing.
He looked up when I came past.
He did not stand and he did not put a hand out, and he did not say anything about the fight.
He put his chin up about two centimetres. Once.
I did the same thing back.
Then I kept walking, and that was the whole of it, and it was the correct amount.
---
I got to the end of the passage and stopped and put my back on the wall.
Then I opened the Tower.
> **[Floor One Placement: 1st / 100.]**
>
> **[First Place Reward.]**
> **[All Attributes +2.]**
>
> **[Strength: 33 → 35.]**
>
> **[Endurance: 43 → 45.]**
>
> **[Agility: 42 → 44.]**
>
> **[Perception: 28 → 30.]**
> **[Maximum Health: 430 → 450.]**
>
> **[Health: 430/450 → 450/450.]**
>**[Bonus Unassigned Attribute Points: +5.]**
> **[Unassigned Attribute Points: 9 → 14.]**
> **[Special Item Acquired: Adamantine Ingot.]**
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