Chapter 344 - 335 — Snatchers in the Pass III (Bonus)
It dropped from thirty-five metres with the wings shut.
Halfway down it opened them and committed — and the instant its line locked, four things happened in about a second and a half.
`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]`
The violet ring went onto the left wing root.
`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]`
He had been holding it for four minutes and he put all of it into the mark, and the wing folded in the middle of the descent.
`[AELLO — HP: 19,600 → 16,400]`
The dive became a fall.
It came down thirty metres short of the wagon with the left wing not working and hit the road at an angle, and it was still trying to climb out of it — and Finn Hale, who had spent two minutes standing four metres away looking bored, was on the wing before it got off the ground.
Both axes into the brand.
`[AELLO — HP: 16,400 → 13,500]`
It got about three metres up and came down again.
`[AELLO — HP: 13,500 → 12,700]`
---
And then it was on the ground, which was the only place any of them could beat it.
It was terrifying on the ground. Talons the length of a hand, a wingspan it used like a weapon, and a speed over the road that was faster than anything with feet had any business managing — it put Finn on his back twice and opened his forearm and took a piece out of the front of James’s coat.
It did not stay still, and everything it did was aimed at getting the ruined wing to work long enough to reach a ledge.
Fossor stopped it.
James brought it in from a hundred metres up the road for the first time all Chapter, and every time Aello found six metres of clear stone to run at, the stone stopped being there.
Three times. The third time it came down onto its chest.
`[AELLO — HP: 12,700 → 10,100]`
`[AELLO — HP: 10,100 → 7,300]`
Cillian was not helping with it. Cillian had eleven ordinary Harpies above the road and was the only reason none of them came down.
Ronan never left the wagon. Not once, not for a second, with an elite eleven metres away and his best friend on the ground twice.
Maeve sustained the brand on the creature through pure focus while keeping both hands clamped over the dying courier’s wound.
And Finn and James did the actual work, which was the wing, over and over, until the whole left side of the thing was a mess and it could not get more than a metre off the road.
`[AELLO — HP: 7,300 → 4,200]`
---
It went for the wagon at the end.
Not for Finn and not for James. It went past both of them at ground level, straight down the road at the tailboard, and there was nothing on that side but a dead draft horse standing in the dust.
It went through the horse.
It took the whole skeleton apart in one movement and did not slow down.
`[SUMMONED UNIT DESTROYED]`
It bought a second.
James Grave Stepped nothing, cast nothing and did nothing clever. He ran, and he got there because Finn had already put an axe into the good wing from behind and turned the thing sideways into the tailboard, and it hit the wagon with a crash that put Maeve’s shoulder into the far wall.
James put Durendal into the side of its neck and out the other side of it.
`[AELLO — HP: 4,200 → 0]`
`[ELITE HOSTILE SLAIN]`
`[EXP GAINED: 1,600]`
`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +30]`
`[MANA: 1,910 / 3,100]`
It went down under the back wheel and the wagon went over the wing and kept going.
---
The rest of them did not come.
James watched for it and it did not happen. The eleven Harpies stayed on the ledges — moving along them, calling, keeping pace with the wagon above the road — and none of them committed, because a man with white light on his knuckles had shot four of them out of the air on the way down and because the formation had closed up until there was nothing worth diving at.
Two tried, in the last three hundred metres.
Cillian got both.
[HARPIES SLAIN ×8]
[EXP GAINED: 2,720]
`[TIME REMAINING: 0:04:05]`
`[DISTANCE REMAINING: 0.6 KM]`
---
The pass ended the way a corridor ends.
The cliffs came apart on both sides at once, the shadow went off the road, and the light hit all of them full in the face — open ground, flat and ochre and enormous, with the sun back on it and the sky the whole way to the horizon.
The noise stopped. That was the strangest part. Four minutes of wingbeats and screaming and wheels coming back doubled off stone, and then nothing but a wagon on a road in the open.
And six hundred metres directly in front of them, at the end of a straight run with no bends in it, stood the Eastern Gatehouse.
It was a fort. Close enough now to see it properly — a curtain wall across the neck of the valley, two square towers, and a set of iron-bound doors in the middle of it under an arch, with figures moving on the wall head.
"That’s it," said Halden, from the floor of the wagon, without being able to see any of it.
"That’s it," said Maeve.
---
They ran the last six hundred metres, and it was not fast.
The bay was finished. It had a ghoul’s rake down one flank from an hour ago and it had been in harness under attack for the whole of the afternoon, and it went at what it had left. The brown one was better and could not go without the other. The repaired wheel knocked and knocked and knocked.
Maeve did not come out of the wagon bed. She had both hands on Halden and told them the distance twice by shouting through the torn roof.
Finn went at the horses’ heads. Ronan walked beside the board with his shield still up out of pure habit. Cillian walked backwards for the first two hundred metres watching the cliffs, and then turned round and stopped bothering.
James walked at the tailboard with a dead Harpy’s wing under his boot at one point and did not raise a single thing, because there was nothing left on this floor that needed killing and he was going to be able to feel his own mana again in the morning.
At three hundred metres the doors started to open.
They did it slowly, and men came out in front of them in mail with spears, and somebody on the wall head was shouting something down that nobody in Team Zero could make out.
At eighty metres, Halden got himself up onto one elbow.
Nobody had asked him to. Maeve told him not to and he did it anyway, and he got his shoulder against the inside of the wagon and put the satchel out in front of him where the men at the door could see it, and held it there.
---
The wagon went under the arch.
The front wheels crossed the line of the gate, and then the axle, and then the bed, and the whole thing was through with the rear wheels still on the road outside — and nothing happened.
Then the back of the wagon crossed it.
`[ESCORT TARGET DELIVERED]`
`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE COMPLETE]`
`[FLOOR 32 CLEARED]`
`[TIME REMAINING: 0:00:38]`
---
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Then Cillian sat down on the ground inside the gatehouse, in the dirt, with his back against the wall, and put his head against the stone and shut his eyes.
Ronan let the shield come off his arm and hang from the strap, which he had not done since the riverbed.
Finn stood at the bay’s head with both hands on the cheekpiece and let the horse push its face into his chest and did not move it away.
And James stood still.
That was all he did. He stood in a gateway in the middle of an emptying afternoon and did not walk anywhere, because for two hours he had not once stood still for longer than eleven seconds and his legs had forgotten the option existed.
Gatehouse men came past him with a stretcher and got into the back of the wagon, and Maeve went with them, talking, both hands still red. Somebody took the satchel out of Halden’s fist and it took them a second to get it.
He was alive.
That was the whole condition and there had never been another one.
---
`[FLOOR 32 CLEAR REWARD]`
`[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 7,600]`
`[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 38,000 PER MEMBER]`
`[JAMES GANNER — LEVEL: 44]`
`[EXP: 17,805 / 75,000]`
`[SKILL PROFICIENCY UPDATED]`
`[GRAVE STEP — PROFICIENCY INCREASED]`
`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — PROFICIENCY INCREASED]`
`[FLOOR MVP — MAEVE CALLAHAN]`
`[REASON: ESCORT TARGET SUSTAINED — THREE CRITICAL INTERVENTIONS]`
Nothing ranked up. Nothing evolved. Fossor’s line in his list said exactly what it had said that morning.
Finn read the MVP panel over James’s shoulder.
"Yeah," he said. "Obviously."
"She was in the wagon the whole time," said Cillian, from the ground, without opening his eyes. "She never hit *anything*."
"She kept him alive three times."
"That’s what I said. She never hit anything. It’s incredible."
---
James looked back down the road.
The pass stood behind them, narrow and dark between two cliffs, with birds of some kind moving along the tops of the walls where a floor’s worth of Harpies had followed a wagon for four minutes and not got what they came for.
Two hours ago he had walked onto a caravan road and looked at a man in his fifties with a hole in his side and a satchel, and had understood immediately that nothing he owned was going to help.
He had killed an elite and cleared the floor and nothing he had done was the reason it worked.
The reason it worked was that a wheel got changed in fourteen minutes and a courier told them which pin to use, and that Ronan never once left the driver’s board, and that Cillian learned to wait, and that Maeve spent two hours in a wagon bed with both hands on somebody’s abdomen.
`[FLOOR 33 AVAILABLE]`
James left it closed and went to find out whether the man was going to live.